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.
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.
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.
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.