The Xbox hasn't had a successful console in over a decade, and every studio they spend massive money to buy either doesn't provide a product worth any of its value nor move anything back towards Xbox having a successful market share. I think Hi-Fi Rush is the only Xbox produced game that anyone liked in forever, and that was just a cult hit.
The only remote foothold they have is Gamepass, which is probably not super profitable overall considering its relatively cheap cost versus amount of hours it offers.
All of that was a problem and would have been a problem both before or regardless of the Woke. They are just a company with no ability to break back into the market after their brief seat in it, and nobody there seems to understand you can't just throw money at the problem until you win (see also EGS for the same lesson).
Not that any of the politics helped that problem, of course.
I prescribe to the Razorfist theory on these companies turning to politics:
Go broke, get woke, ultimately croak
A lot of the game industry heavily relied on a few talents to carry them and neglected nurturing more. When those talents left, either by their own devices or got cancelled to oblivion, we see the result of when they don't have them to provide a foundation to their games.
Xbox was already laying the foundational pieces for this failure before Woke was even a thing, it was happening when it was still called Intersectionality and many people here were still happily asleep Liberals.
When the Red Ring was destroying every console they had and they were still unable to push into the Japanese market despite spending a lot of money on putting JRPGs and anime games on 360, they were losing ground. Halo keep them afloat for as long as it could, but you can't survive on one game alone. If the PS3 hadn't bungled itself so badly on launch it might have just straight ended them right there.
Xbone's disastrous reveal spectacle and then failing to ever recover from that was basically the end of their power and we've just been watching the bleedout since. Making everything backwards compatible was a great move to keep consumers happy, but didn't really make them much money because those games were already purchased.
And as such, I don't think anything about their wokeness really comes into play here. They'd have failed regardless of if they did or didn't, nor would any amount of talented devs have saved them from a hardware issue and then a PR bungle like that. Sony has shown that you can shrug off constant woke games failing and still maintain some level of presence on your next one, something Xbox hasn't managed to begin with.
What do you think they could have done to avoid the mistakes you mentioned?
How do you think they could salvage the Xbox brand given its current state? Could they start the road to recovery by just going back to the OG Xbox era of releasing new, interesting experiences like Crimson Skies, PGR, MechAssault, etc?
It'd be interesting to hear about some ways a new generation of creators with genuine passion could avoided making the same mistakes of those in charge in the present.
Assuming the RROD is impossible to avoid, a better refund/fix policy would have gone a long way. Because for most people, myself included, the "send it back and we will fix it" was extremely lacking. It was a cumbersome process that was incredibly difficult for a younger person (a huge market share) to accomplish, only for them to usually send it back still broken or break again shortly after. And by the second time they usually pulled "out of warranty get fucked!"
While a product recall and full replace would have likely cost them an absurd amount of money, it would have done wonders to keep their brand loyalty high and their reputation as better than Playstation longer lived. As well as keep dev companies confident in developing for the console into the future knowing it would reach the maximum audience.
Another would have been to drop Xbox Live Gold. PS3 was able to survive its entire life with free online, so them demanding you pay for it still continues to be fucking offensive and was even more so at that time. Same with charging for DLC, like when they demanded Valve charge for the L4D maps, which should have been either free or buyable with Achievement Points (giving them some value beyond braggarts). While full games are fine to charge, map packs should never have been paid for.
That's all in the past so its meaningless now, especially as those last two points they managed to corrupt the industry into following their example and becoming the standard.
As for now? I don't think its salvagable. You'd need a lot of "must have" games to sell consoles to people, and then AA games can start being produced for it by having a decent install base. They've shown they aren't able to get those level of games anymore (and PS5 has shown no console really is), so attaching themselves to the Box itself is a sinking ship.
Gamepass is a really good thing, and I think if its stable profit wise they should keep focusing on that. If they can move a lot of their catalogue to it and make them all backwards compatible I think it can become a "must have" streaming service. But that's the only real future I can see for them short of a radical change.
Yes, "get woke go broke" is always true in the sense that nobody wants that shit and it's the final nail in the coffin, but things turning woke are a sign that there was already rotting flesh and blood in the water - as applied to individual companies or our civilization as a whole.
And this is why capitalism is the best system for commerce. The market will always correct itself eventually. If the higher ups at Microsoft refuse to learn from their mistakes, then Microsoft can die too. Good riddance.
It really is a shame that Microsoft is considered more of a "lame duck" among the console manufacturers.
They had a great thing going in the original Xbox era when Forza and Halo got their starts and coexisted among other cool, creative IPs like PGR, Crimson Skies, and MechAssault.
Things looked great in the Xbox 360 era too when we got Forza Motorsport 2-4, Halo 3, and a wave of FPS' and other games that notably performed better on that console than the PS3 in the late 2000s.
Microsoft were doing a pretty good job in my opinion at making the console for everyone. They made hardware and games that had the visuals and performance to lure in normies but still had enough depth and replayability to win over more hardcore gamers.
They knew for a time how to make gaming cool and popular, if you will.
Then they started focusing on making the Xbox a multimedia console and seemingly forgot why people played video games. They started shifting toward a goal of unsustainable short term profit rather than long term appeal and game depth.
Now, the Xbox brand doesn't seem to have much of an identity at all, barring that of a brand recognition marketing tool.
I hope Microsoft gets an Elon who can start cleaning out the wokeness and greed. Make it a company that truly aspires to innovate and create products with quality and depth in mind.
iirc ZeniMax insisted on a big multiplayer game with microtransactions, which Arkane didn't want to do since they make single player games, and they were struggling a lot with it, then Microsoft bought ZeniMax, and instead of realizing "oh this is a disaster heading off a cliff" Microsoft refused to mitigate losses and insisted Redfall keep going. And we know Microsoft is also pushing DEI shit. Probably had a Microsoft employee
And this is just Arkane Austin closing. Arkane has its Austin studio and its Lyon studio. Austin did Dishonored, Prey, and co-developed a couple Wolfenstein games. Lyon did Dishonored 2, Dishonored DOTO, Deathloop, and they're in the middle of making a Blade game.
So I'm not sure if this is getting rid of rot, because Microsoft didn't change from this and Arkane Lyon wasn't affected by this.
If Microsoft had been smart, they would have gotten Arkane Austin playing to its strengths because even if their games weren't selling like hotcakes they would have been useful to draw people into paying for Xbox Game Pass. Just scale things back a bit and not try some big budget multiplayer game from a studio that had zero experience with such a thing and never wanted to do.
Yes, a multiplayer game with microtransaction will be more profitable if it's good enough to get people to buy it and keep them playing to start buying microtransactions, but forcing a game to be multiplayer so you can stuff it with microtransactions is just going to crash and burn.
Reminder that Microsoft is a pajeet company now and they don't give a shit about brands or frachises, just wringing every last drop of value out of the stock and then throwing away the dessicated husk.
Find it kinda funny this happens not too long after them heavily pushing 'diversity' characters...
"NoBodY cOUld haVe pREEEdicTeD tHis!"
The Xbox hasn't had a successful console in over a decade, and every studio they spend massive money to buy either doesn't provide a product worth any of its value nor move anything back towards Xbox having a successful market share. I think Hi-Fi Rush is the only Xbox produced game that anyone liked in forever, and that was just a cult hit.
The only remote foothold they have is Gamepass, which is probably not super profitable overall considering its relatively cheap cost versus amount of hours it offers.
All of that was a problem and would have been a problem both before or regardless of the Woke. They are just a company with no ability to break back into the market after their brief seat in it, and nobody there seems to understand you can't just throw money at the problem until you win (see also EGS for the same lesson).
Not that any of the politics helped that problem, of course.
I prescribe to the Razorfist theory on these companies turning to politics:
Go broke, get woke, ultimately croak
A lot of the game industry heavily relied on a few talents to carry them and neglected nurturing more. When those talents left, either by their own devices or got cancelled to oblivion, we see the result of when they don't have them to provide a foundation to their games.
Xbox was already laying the foundational pieces for this failure before Woke was even a thing, it was happening when it was still called Intersectionality and many people here were still happily asleep Liberals.
When the Red Ring was destroying every console they had and they were still unable to push into the Japanese market despite spending a lot of money on putting JRPGs and anime games on 360, they were losing ground. Halo keep them afloat for as long as it could, but you can't survive on one game alone. If the PS3 hadn't bungled itself so badly on launch it might have just straight ended them right there.
Xbone's disastrous reveal spectacle and then failing to ever recover from that was basically the end of their power and we've just been watching the bleedout since. Making everything backwards compatible was a great move to keep consumers happy, but didn't really make them much money because those games were already purchased.
And as such, I don't think anything about their wokeness really comes into play here. They'd have failed regardless of if they did or didn't, nor would any amount of talented devs have saved them from a hardware issue and then a PR bungle like that. Sony has shown that you can shrug off constant woke games failing and still maintain some level of presence on your next one, something Xbox hasn't managed to begin with.
What do you think they could have done to avoid the mistakes you mentioned?
How do you think they could salvage the Xbox brand given its current state? Could they start the road to recovery by just going back to the OG Xbox era of releasing new, interesting experiences like Crimson Skies, PGR, MechAssault, etc?
It'd be interesting to hear about some ways a new generation of creators with genuine passion could avoided making the same mistakes of those in charge in the present.
Assuming the RROD is impossible to avoid, a better refund/fix policy would have gone a long way. Because for most people, myself included, the "send it back and we will fix it" was extremely lacking. It was a cumbersome process that was incredibly difficult for a younger person (a huge market share) to accomplish, only for them to usually send it back still broken or break again shortly after. And by the second time they usually pulled "out of warranty get fucked!"
While a product recall and full replace would have likely cost them an absurd amount of money, it would have done wonders to keep their brand loyalty high and their reputation as better than Playstation longer lived. As well as keep dev companies confident in developing for the console into the future knowing it would reach the maximum audience.
Another would have been to drop Xbox Live Gold. PS3 was able to survive its entire life with free online, so them demanding you pay for it still continues to be fucking offensive and was even more so at that time. Same with charging for DLC, like when they demanded Valve charge for the L4D maps, which should have been either free or buyable with Achievement Points (giving them some value beyond braggarts). While full games are fine to charge, map packs should never have been paid for.
That's all in the past so its meaningless now, especially as those last two points they managed to corrupt the industry into following their example and becoming the standard.
As for now? I don't think its salvagable. You'd need a lot of "must have" games to sell consoles to people, and then AA games can start being produced for it by having a decent install base. They've shown they aren't able to get those level of games anymore (and PS5 has shown no console really is), so attaching themselves to the Box itself is a sinking ship.
Gamepass is a really good thing, and I think if its stable profit wise they should keep focusing on that. If they can move a lot of their catalogue to it and make them all backwards compatible I think it can become a "must have" streaming service. But that's the only real future I can see for them short of a radical change.
Yes, "get woke go broke" is always true in the sense that nobody wants that shit and it's the final nail in the coffin, but things turning woke are a sign that there was already rotting flesh and blood in the water - as applied to individual companies or our civilization as a whole.
And this is why capitalism is the best system for commerce. The market will always correct itself eventually. If the higher ups at Microsoft refuse to learn from their mistakes, then Microsoft can die too. Good riddance.
It really is a shame that Microsoft is considered more of a "lame duck" among the console manufacturers.
They had a great thing going in the original Xbox era when Forza and Halo got their starts and coexisted among other cool, creative IPs like PGR, Crimson Skies, and MechAssault.
Things looked great in the Xbox 360 era too when we got Forza Motorsport 2-4, Halo 3, and a wave of FPS' and other games that notably performed better on that console than the PS3 in the late 2000s.
Microsoft were doing a pretty good job in my opinion at making the console for everyone. They made hardware and games that had the visuals and performance to lure in normies but still had enough depth and replayability to win over more hardcore gamers.
They knew for a time how to make gaming cool and popular, if you will.
Then they started focusing on making the Xbox a multimedia console and seemingly forgot why people played video games. They started shifting toward a goal of unsustainable short term profit rather than long term appeal and game depth.
Now, the Xbox brand doesn't seem to have much of an identity at all, barring that of a brand recognition marketing tool.
I hope Microsoft gets an Elon who can start cleaning out the wokeness and greed. Make it a company that truly aspires to innovate and create products with quality and depth in mind.
iirc ZeniMax insisted on a big multiplayer game with microtransactions, which Arkane didn't want to do since they make single player games, and they were struggling a lot with it, then Microsoft bought ZeniMax, and instead of realizing "oh this is a disaster heading off a cliff" Microsoft refused to mitigate losses and insisted Redfall keep going. And we know Microsoft is also pushing DEI shit. Probably had a Microsoft employee
And this is just Arkane Austin closing. Arkane has its Austin studio and its Lyon studio. Austin did Dishonored, Prey, and co-developed a couple Wolfenstein games. Lyon did Dishonored 2, Dishonored DOTO, Deathloop, and they're in the middle of making a Blade game.
So I'm not sure if this is getting rid of rot, because Microsoft didn't change from this and Arkane Lyon wasn't affected by this.
If Microsoft had been smart, they would have gotten Arkane Austin playing to its strengths because even if their games weren't selling like hotcakes they would have been useful to draw people into paying for Xbox Game Pass. Just scale things back a bit and not try some big budget multiplayer game from a studio that had zero experience with such a thing and never wanted to do.
Yes, a multiplayer game with microtransaction will be more profitable if it's good enough to get people to buy it and keep them playing to start buying microtransactions, but forcing a game to be multiplayer so you can stuff it with microtransactions is just going to crash and burn.
Reminder that Microsoft is a pajeet company now and they don't give a shit about brands or frachises, just wringing every last drop of value out of the stock and then throwing away the dessicated husk.