Crazy how Microsoft spent the GDP of a decent sized country on acquiring game developers to bolster Xbox, then gave that strategy about 25 months to actually work before deciding "nevermind, pivot to AI then sell it for parts."
They really fucked up on their marketing by saying everything is an Xbox. Confusing non-gamers, annoying real gamers, and disappointing aspiring gamers.
Literal definition of Monkey's Paw:
All the Phil Spencer haters get to rejoice that he is gone. But now he is replaced by a woman who has only ever had AI related positions at Microsoft, and previously worked at Meta.
Even her letter to employees sounds AI generated.
Exactly.
People forget that the Xbox game division is only a subset of Microsoft so Phil always had to answer to the bigger suits.
Phil actually made games. Phil came from a pretty cool era and I’ve seen him interviewed over the years by people who you only go talk to if you liked games.
As far as US game company execs go, Phil wasn’t the worst.
Also as far as I know, unlike the
of a certain studio who ruined WoW and CoD and more, he wasn’t mentioned recently on a certain set of files that were made public recently.
I know it’s not exactly a high bar, but Phil actually seemed like someone who cared about gaming in general, but he probably also didn’t get to be in charge by pushing back and sticking his neck out to save everybody else whenever it came to making the Xbox division as profitable as the suits above him demanded.
Whoever is next will be likely switching from a shovel to an excavator to dig the Xbox brand’s grave.
Who replaced him?
Her name is in the 3rd sentence of the article posted by OP.
But, as a special treat for the lazy, her name is Asha Sharma.
I’d be surprised if Xbox is a thing in 5 years after this news. The way things are right now Microsoft can’t make an Xbox console that will succeed by any metric. Maybe it’ll stick around as software.
Phil had to salvage the brand after the fucking disaster that was Xbox One and I don’t think he was terrible but it clearly wasn’t working out.
Replacing him with the head of Core AI is a fucking joke though.
With the cost of hardware skyrocketing and Sony closing studios gaming is in a really dark place right now.
Gaming is in a great place. AAA gaming is not, because of-fucking-course corpos don't understand art.
I wonder if this is a huge demotion for the AI guy. AI teams in Microsoft are "good" right now, I wonder if he fucked up in some way and they put him on xbox.
Yeah I don’t know. The knee jerk reaction Is “hey make Xbox have more AI”. She at least has the sense to have her first press release say “we’ll have no AI slop in our games” but we’ll see if that lasts.
CoD has been caught using AI art already.
The term „AI art“ irks me, IMO it tries to legitimize the virtual theft that it’s based on by implying there‘s a creative, artistic process behind it. It‘s gotta be a lobbied term.
Yeah thats fair. Slop is more appropriate.
COD hasn't been worth playing in ~12 years.
A silver lining is that the NVIDIA/OpenAI deal was cut by ~70% this week, so hopefully the reality of AI not being a panacea sets in for those who have been driving the prices up. If the planned data centers never actually get built, production will shift back and consumer pricing should adjust accordingly. The MBA class will keep trying to manipulate it artificially of course, but they'll only be able to keep the ruse this far from reality for so long.
Considering how the person replacing Spencer has been known from leading Microsoft's AI division and isn't much of a gamer, this doesn't make Xbox's future rosy. Dwindling sales, large layoffs and RAM prices skyrocketing... I highly doubt they can build a competitive console.
Hey don't discount them that much, they also can't make games either. They're going for full on business-only approach, consumers are not a priority for them at all anymore.
You can sell consoles with advertisement and marketing. The product is a secondary concern.
And with AI + bunch of privately owned mass media, you can saturate the brains of the next generation of gamers with endless targeted ads.
Fully expect Discord to begin vomiting ad spam into random chat streams like Reddit channels are getting bombarded with Crypto Casino promotions.
It really does seem to follow the classic arc of going from marketing to consumers to B2B but like, you can't sell games B2B can you? It's so direct to consumer
If ram goes up for everyone, Microsoft is no worse placed. There will be less sales overall, but they could take a larger piece of that pie of they were good. They won't.
One thing that might go in their favour is pc gaming. If ram and video cards get super crazy for long enough, people might have a single PC and gaming console. The steam deck should be well placed to take advantage. Microsoft could be too, with foresight.
"with foresight"
My brother in christ, they put an "AI" shithead in charge. They practically by definition cannot have foresight.
I'll not sure Spencer had been doing a great job, but this feels incredibly abrupt and makes me wonder if Xbox's next generation hardware plans are cancelled in favor of a software and AI approach. The new CEO being an AI suit makes me think they want to take shit it a very different direction.
Phil was probably the last thing keep Xbox from fully imploding. You could tell he was an actual gamer that cared about the Xbox as a games console and not whatever Frankenstein they are going to turn it into.
It’s sad but Xbox had a really good run. Xbox won’t exist beyond the next console generation, it may not even make it that far before it just becomes gamepass.
Microsoft needs to have a sit down with Sega on how to become a decent 3rd party developer.
If Spencer couldn't keep the Xbox machine alive, an outsider who's not a gamer is gonna ruin it more so than it is
Microslop is making a number of baffling choices that were influenced by huffing the farts of Satya and other AI fools. Asha Sharma is in no way capable of running Xbox anywhere but into the ground (not like she'll have to do much, given the state of Xbox). Phil Spencer retiring from Microslop is probably a move he made knowing they are going to continue their downward spiral. Sarah Bond resigning from her position is a curious one. I wonder if Microslop execs talked future plans for Xbox with her, and felt so stunned by their incompetence, Sarah decided to abandon the Xbox division. There are other factors likely involved, but, I doubt we'll be privy to those details just yet. When the postmortem of Xbox is released...The people involved might talk about, at least I hope so.
As I don't feel Xbox as a console has a future, my current plan is to abandon Xbox as a platform. It will take time because right now buying an upgraded Gaming PC will be difficult, due to the insanity of hardware prices. For now, I'll have to simply save my money and bide my time.
I quit Xbox after 3 Xbox 360s got the red ring of death just after the warranty expired. I'll never go back even though I want clockwork revolution and a couple other exclusives.
What the fuck is "overmuch"?
I edited that to: "not like she'll have to do much, given the state of Xbox". I was typing faster than my brain could think...It's been a day.
Haha gotcha. I actually searched it up and overmuch is a word. Hadn't heard that one before.
Spencer leaving Microsoft: Yay!
Spencer being replaced by a Marketing Exec who leads an AI division: FUUUUUUCK
How sad for Obsidian Entertainment to go the same way as Black Isle Studios... but they probably will when the Xbox division completely fails.
PlayStation outlives yet another competitor.
Another?
SEGA? A bit ancient history by now I guess
I was going to say "good riddance", but considering that his replacement is a former AI exec... Lol.
To be fair, I don't envy anyone who is put in charge of the mess that is Xbox right now.
Phil if you somehow read this then please make a new company!!! Many will follow you from Microsoft and Xbox to whatever you decide to do. It is time for a new company similar to Valve to rise up!
If you don't want to then that makes sense. You have enough at Xbox and with Microsoft over the years
Thanks for doing your best under the slop that Microslop has dumped on Xbox over all these years. Salute!
Please explain yourself. I'm not going to judge you, I'm genuinely curious where you got this perception of Phil Spencer from?
From my perspective, he was in charge during the fall of Xbox. There may have been a few good decisions he made, like backwards compat or whatever, but on the whole he destroyed Xbox. I don't understand how some people can simultaneously be pissed at all the terrible decisions that company has been making for over a decade while also glazing the guy in charge of making those decisions.
If Xbox wasn't part of the monopolist that is Microsoft, they would've gone out of business after the Xbox One. Instead, as is usually the case for orgs/people like this, they've been able to fail upwards all while dragging the entire gaming industry through the dirt (eg the horrible Activision acquisition, among many others). It's actually incredible how, despite not even needing to worry about competitive pressures, Xbox still failed so badly.
So again, what circumstances have lead you to see Phil Spencer as anything other than an incompetent moron?
Phil sucks. Gamepass was a failure. He should have focused on getting their studios to make actual good games.
Good. Phil Spencer may have been a better lead for Xbox during the OG and 360 years, but the XB1 was a joke and the Series X, while pretty good, could have been better. And doubling the price of GamePass Ultimate made it a non-starter for a lot of people. Half the price of a game every month and I don't get to keep any of them? Huh? At $15 it was a no-brainer; at $30, it's a non-starter. And they sold the Series S on GamePass.
Sarah Bond always annoyed me. Seemed like she was always badly trying to put out a fire. I don't know where she was before, I'm sure she earned her spot somehow, but she always seemed like the "bad cop" in most situations.
As for PlayStation, they're run by bankers and lawyers, not gamers. I liked the first two PlayStations. PS3 was definitely better than XB1 (even though XB1's contemporary was the PS4... PS3 was still better). I haven't had a PlayStation since PS3, but I don't like how Sony does business. That said, they're Japanese, and they make/own a lot of the anime and music I listen to (I listen to a lot of Japanese music). But, that's like saying Samsung phones are good because their refrigerators are. It's a fallacy at best, but it's mostly bullshit. PlayStation is very much its own thing at Sony. And I don't agree with most of their decisions.
Steam looks like the least crappy option right now, with the Switch 2 being fully last-generation and costing like $500... and the games being $80 each... Screw that. (Switch 1 is still cool for what it is, the 2.5D Zelda games, and Animal Crossing. If you're into cosy/chill games.) I kinda want a Steam Machine but I won't pay $1000 for one. I think people thinking it will be $500-600 are huffing some serious hopium. $700 feels like a compromise between what gamers want it to be ($500) and what it probably will be ($1000). They want Valve to take a loss on each unit because they kiss up to Valve on social media, but Valve has already said they are not going to sell it at a loss. So all I'm saying is... get ready for a four-digit price tag. Especially if it's gonna run modern games at good framerates and resolutions. The one thing I can say for the "it'll be $500" guys is, the M4 Mac mini is $500 and that can run Cyberpunk. And it's a whole Mac, so you know it's a good computer. Thing is, most game devs aren't friendly to people who actually put their money where their mouth is and actually kick Microslop to the curb. They'll support Linux hoping you'll just go back to Windows on the same machine, but you buy a computer that (AFAIK, until Windows for ARM comes out) can't run Windows... then it's FU in particular. (And honestly, no one really buys a Mac for gaming. They're just cool computers that aren't PCs.)
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