What do you think they're aiming to achieve with these new console-exclusive games? What's their goal?
The real answer? They want to maintain enthusiasm within the core Xbox fanbase to ensure at least 10-25m of them wind up buying a Helix over the next 2 years after launch, so that way it at least can not be an absolute financial crater. At least, thats what the intention was when the exclusive decision was made. Things are moving very quickly as the reality of MS' current situation sets in. Expect more insane last-minute shake ups.
What do you think the end result will be?
They become a full-fledged 3rd party publisher with a subscription service (GamePass) that has a curated set of games, as well as their own offerings, with no Day 1 releases anymore. But we have a long, stupid, and painful road to go down before they ultimately decide to abruptly do that.
From what I know, theres just no real avenue they can go down that will actually take them to where fans want them (for the sake of brevity, lets just say that is 360-era Xbox), and the leeway they have to hit their target is far shorter than anyone in the public sphere realizes, but hopefully now that this complete about-face mere days since their press conference will at least break the illusion somewhat.
Theres a lot that can be said on the matter, and how their haphazard decision making since she came in has made things considerably worse on almost every front. The reality is, shes a mid-30s modern exec who models herself after the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the worlds - loads to say with very little substance to back it up, and a very limited understanding of the business she is working in.
Lets just go over hardware, because she decided going in that this was the area in most need of improvement, it was the area Nadella wanted to focus on given that they had contracts with AMD that were going to need to be delivered and they didn't want to go in facing the hardware headwinds they'd been facing. The problem is, the Helix is Bond and Spencer's machine. Sure, they are going to revert some choices on the open-storefront nature of it (this is causing a big mess) but this thing was never designed to be a mass-market machine. They weren't planning on making a ton of these and shipping it en masse to a WW scale. The original plan for the console that would later be known as Project Helix was to serve as an OEM baseline, with a limited amount of shipments by MS into their strongest regions, while creating a non-HW focused ecosystem for themselves.
Asha's coming in and trying to take this device and use it to do something it was never intended to do. But moreover, the problem with Xbox HW has not been the console, and this is something almost no one ever brings up. During the PS4/X1 generation, the X1 still sold comparably to the PS4 in the US/NA and UK. Where they largely receded was Japan, which the XSS|X has done better in (although a far cry from the 360) and most-importantly Europe, but this was a problem of MS' own making. Instead of curating publishing deals with partners in those regions that could help move HW, working with local distributors and marketing groups to help bolster the Xbox and its brand, they just kept closing regional offices, outsourcing the work to 3rd party marketing groups in those regions, and basically folded up their own distribution network. Heck, they aren't even trying to increase shipments of Xbox Series consoles - restarting their supply chain for that machine would be extremely expensive at this late stage, and they just don't want to absorb that cost while also trying to get their ducks in a row for a new HW launch, and even if they did massively increase shipments - they have a ton of supply that is going unsold as is. Bell can twist whatever stat he wants regarding supply & demand, but the reason they stopped shipping to large regions and retailers began dropping Xbox, even in NA, was due to demand dropping. They're making Gears exclusive, while not trying to ship more HW on a global scale to even begin capitalize on it, and thats before we even broach the topic of how PC-releases have been the primary undermining force for the value proposition of Xbox HW, not PS5 releases.
This is why all of this is just talk; you can't sit there and say you're bringing back exclusives, which yes - exclusives can help move HW numbers - but if you're not putting that HW into markets where you're not really available in, and putting projects that could entice users in that region to adopt the machine, then you're never really going to get growth in the markets that turned their back on you. Until MS gets serious about shipping hardware globally, their fortunes on hardware are simply never going to turn around. Exclusives are one piece of the puzzle - an important one, but nowhere near the only one.
What do you foresee being the result of these layoffs? We're getting word that we're looking at about 1,000 of them. Do you think it's going to be concentrated into either Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, or Activision? Will it be more spread out? We're hearing that one studio is likely gone but 1,000 layoffs could kill several studios depending on how the cuts are being approached.
Studios will be closed, some teams will get folded into other studios as support staff for their big tentpole or just development support in general.
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Ich raste aus! Wer hätte das für möglich gehalten? Geil!
