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.
The more I've learned about the Red Ring issue the more I question how successful the 360 actually was.
They claim an 80 million units sold, but when you had a failure rate of 54% to RROD (For the models before the Elite) how many people were actually using a working console?
For comparison, the Yellow light of Death on the PS3 (on the Fats) was about a 10% failure rate and the Wii had a failure rate of about 3%, industry standard is to expect 5%.
And as you've said, no success in JPN at all.
Anecdotally, everyone I knew in AUS that played regularly on a 360 ended up needing 3 or more consoles over the generation.
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.
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.
The more I've learned about the Red Ring issue the more I question how successful the 360 actually was. They claim an 80 million units sold, but when you had a failure rate of 54% to RROD (For the models before the Elite) how many people were actually using a working console? For comparison, the Yellow light of Death on the PS3 (on the Fats) was about a 10% failure rate and the Wii had a failure rate of about 3%, industry standard is to expect 5%. And as you've said, no success in JPN at all. Anecdotally, everyone I knew in AUS that played regularly on a 360 ended up needing 3 or more consoles over the generation.
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.