Basically: The thing everyone worried about and quite frankly knew would happen when Microsoft started buying every studios they could get their hands on… happened.
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish. It never went away. Careless incompetence. The shareholders way.
Shareholders: “Wow, Microsoft is really expanding by buying up those studios, promising great output for them in the future!”. Line goes up.
Microsoft then does nothing except investing all of their money into AI.
Shareholders: “Wow, Microsoft is really streamlining their organisation by dumping all of those useless dead weight studios. Excellent management”. Line goes up.
I absolutely hate how on the nose this is. sigh
TIL that this is a valid use of “on the nose” (definition 1). I was genuinely confused, I’m only familar with definition 2 there, “unimaginative; overliteral; lacking nuance; unsophisticated”.
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We are the lucky ten thousand.
“Wow, I hate how on the nose this is”. Line goes up.
“predictable investment”
Yeah. I would look at Microsoft’s aquisition of studios as those studios exiting the space in the long term. Gaming is thriving but it’s not the big studios, it’s the myriad of indies and smaller games that are where the innovation and interest is. The monolithic AAA gaming space is in a crisis of it’s own making - driven by shareholder demands and the view of games as nothing more than franchises to milk every year.
Also, AAA is struggling with games being too large. Every game is so expensive and has so many years of development that it’s hard for a studio to survive a flop without a major publisher. But the major publishers are pushing for studios to pursue games that have a really high flop rate (live-service, competitive shooters/etc). Additionally because every game has so much money invested in it, the studios are scared to try anything too different or unique, resulting in the games having a bland “design-by-committee” and not offering anything meaningfully different from what’s already out there. Features are intentionally held back so that the game will have content to drip-feed the players later, resulting in lacking content at launch.
I really think the AAA industry needs to downside, split up many AAA studios into multiple AA projects.
What I’m worried about is some of those greedy fuckhead parasites would start courting big indie studios and AA games and ruining a part of that scene
Im not even sure the extinguish part is intentional here. I think they are just genuinely this incompetent, but Greys Law applies here imo.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
What we gotta do is start going after the people selling the studios and companies and pillars of society. Make selling off unprofitable or even downright dangerous again and we’ll see companies that compete to grow instead of compete to sell inferiority while intentionally poisoning competence.
See also: the US government
Yep. They don’t understand games so they buy studios that DO understand games, and then turn them into divisions of Microsoft instead of game studios and are surprised that they no longer can make games.
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.
That implies careful planning.
In this case, MS thought just mindlessly throwing money around will somehow bring in massive profits.
Also pretty sure embrace extend extinguish doesn’t apply to a straight up buyout, it’s about taking a competing (often opensource) technology, embracing it and supporting it, then moving to take control over it by extending it (thus becoming the de facto main implementation, as others struggle to keep up with changes), waiting for competition to die out before finally dropping support, thus killing the technology
Its just a vestigal instinct at MSFT these days lol.
Except, game dev companies are not competitors for MS (meaning XBOX), but essential for their survival. What’s the point of extinguishing your source of supply?
Extend but that works too.
They also don’t understand software.
Or user privacy.
Or valuing their own workers.
Or how to respectfully be a part of the F/OSS ecosystem.
Or humanity’s desire to not live in a pollution stream from their AI processing centers (they’re not really “data centers”).
Or that we all wish LinkedIn would self-destruct under the weight of its own bullshit, and magically blink itself out of existence.
Or consent.
I can’t imagine a company founded on its operating system, now deciding vibe coding that flagship product is a good idea… Especially vibe coding literally all of their software products… Dumb as shit.
Also everything they make is now a web browser shell with the app running inside which makes everything slow and memory hungry.
Not a single fucking CEO understands art and games. They only thing they understand is profit$. That’s all that matters to them.
Of something can’t generate a profit, it’s essentially useless. Art? If you can sell it at a profit it’s good. Or doesn’t matter if nobody will ever see it. Oxygen producing trees, sea weed, algae? Not worth a damn until it’s cut down, collected, and sold. Food, water, shelter and basic human needs? Gotta make a profit. Don’t matter if we can produce tons and people are going hungry, homeless and thirsty, if we can’t generate a profit.
Capitalism is a fucking cancer. And these guys are the rogue cells that make it grow.
They are blinded by their own goals, and forget how things are interconnected. Or maybe its just arrogance.
I’ve seen it on the smaller business side too. They want immediate profit, so cut key staff when the work slows a bit, rather than carry the veterans till the next projects. Then complain that things aren’t getting done and the costs to outsource the missing skill set is high.
While the lower levels are like : this is exactly as we predicted it would go.
Remember when Microsoft bought Rare and did basically nothing with them for two decades?
MS shot itself in the foot: MS gutted the team, then the game didn’t come out right and this resulted in bad sales.
Here are the Steam sales numbers:
- DOOM (2016): 5.4M
- DOOM Eternal: 4.7M
- DOOM: The Dark Ages: 1.2M
FYI Doom The Dark Ages was available day 1 on game pass and they were boasting on social media that they had over 3 million players on the first week if I remember right.
It’s Microsoft’s fault the game didn’t sell. Most people (me included) opted to subscribe to game pass for a month instead.
Effectively it was a cost to increase and sustain subscriber numbers.
If they didn’t gain more for the costs spent, they didn’t have a viable marketing plan, or they did and it just failed horribly. Incompetence at the top.
Dark Ages is meh. 2016 was legitimately fresh, and Eternal went a kind of interesting direction, but they legitimately need to take some time and go in a brand brand new direction if they want to make more than four of these games, because the “push forward” formula + lofi sf&f aesthetic alone is not going to cut it on its own.
I bought Doom 2016 and it literally wouldn’t even get past the loading screen. I tried every suggestion I found online and none of them worked. I ended up refunding. It’s why I never even considered the next two.
Edit: Why is this a controversial take?
Why did Microsoft buy all these studios if the plan was to never actually have them make anything?
I’ve been asking that since they bought Rare and proceeded to do nothing with them.
If you buy up all your potential competition, you have no competition.
I miss when Phil Spencer was talking about reviving Heroes of the Storm and Skylanders, he was never gonna do it, but I liked the hopium.
Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard were never competition though
It was about xbox and windows vs other consoles/steam etc
Never know if they’d start doing exclusivity deals with Sony shrug
Fear of missing out. It is institutionally ingrained into Microsoft when they were publicly burned for “missing out on the internet.”
They wanted to own existing IP. Not make new stuff. Buy an asset, milk it, and that’ll do. Any words about long-term maybe were lies.
Yes, but what’s the point of owning the IP if you’re not releasing any new media with it, or even re-releasing the old stuff.
It’s not like we get a bunch of HD Collections out of it. Hell Activision’s take on Wolfenstein hasn’t even been re-released even though with Id and Activision owned by the same company there should be no issues.
Effort vs profitability to rework. Any content immediately releasable as part of gamepass was probably highest value to them.
Looking for exclusivity of games to “beat” other companies. As always is their model of “force people to pay us” instead of “make something compelling”. Its the Microsoft way.
anyone who is hopeful about xbox’s new leadership probably isn’t terribly aware of microsoft’s past. they’ve done this dance a million times. “we’re improving!” -> people believe it yet again -> surprise, they found a way to suck even more now.
Meh.
Their understanding and objectives are simply different than game devs.
And game devs understanding and objectives are different than mine.
MS is a massive org with a research arm with more money than Croesus. God only knows what their C-level and upper management have gleaned from that arm.
At a minimum, we aren’t privy to their actual objectives, so statements like “they don’t get gaming” are meaningless - they get it as well as they need to for their objectives.
Not to defend them, just that we don’t really know what they intend, what they’re really trying to do.
But to call them ignorant would be naive.
But to call them ignorant would be naive.
I used to believe that sort of thing, in my callow youth. They’re rich and powerful, they must know what they’re doing. It’s hard to imagine how anyone paying attention to the news these past ten years could still believe it. There’s no mysterious logic behind their nonsensical decisions. There’s no more than luck involved in any success those decisions have brought them. When they behave like clueless twits it’s because they’re clueless twits.
Yeah, I think all their talk about games not being where they want and bringing in a new head of Xbox and saying “they’ve tried everything” to make their games division successful how they want shows they have no idea and are just going shotgun style with changes and hoping something works.
Hell, the way they let Halo, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout be managed shows they don’t really know anything and just sit around waiting for magic to make them rich.
anyone that’s been in a csuite meeting knows it’s all nepotism and good ol boys
no brains in the lot of them
just keep failing your way up until your so big the government has to bail you out
Their objective is the same as every other corporation:
Provide shareholder value that grows indefinitely.
They don’t care about games or art, they see them as a means to an end, the end being profit above all.
Not to defend them, just that we don’t really know what they intend, what they’re really trying to do.
They want profit. Maximum profit, preferably by the end of this quarter. Failing that, they want monopoly power. The fact that M$ is going all in on AI (it already spent over 150 fucking billion dollars on it as capital expenditure) with nothing to show but “trust me bro” revenue and empty promises should be all you need to know about how far up their own asses the higher ups are.
When they went on a studio acquisition spree, it was with the intent of gaining market share. This was back when cloud gaming was “the next big thing”, but that it has mostly disappeared from headlines should make it obvious that it was not “the next big thing”. Sure, only Google Stadia was shut down, but you don’t hear much about GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna or even Xbox Cloud. “Cloud gaming” was nowhere near as big as they hoped and is unlikely to be, even with the absurd prices of electronics thanks to the AI craze.
We are talking about the M$ which is actively sabotaging their own mainline programs for greater profit extraction. Win11 is a mess of unwanted ads, worse than Win10 ever was. They bundled copilot everywhere - teams, office, even fucking notepad - in order to artificially boost adoption numbers.
All of the decisions that put focus on profit extraction come from higher up. None of them come from Joe Software Engineer, who has to do what the boss says or pack his shit and look for a job elsewhere.
Evil corpos purchasing creativity just to see the soul flee.
Everyone should be able to talk about their current employer as openly as Hays here
More like ‘carpet bombed a lot of bridges’ repeatedly while condescending all the screaming.
Man those quotes from Chris Hays in the article hit hard.
I think I need to watch the video they are from tonight.
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