- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
- games@lemmy.world
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
- games@lemmy.world
- gaming@beehaw.org
You must log in or # to comment.
More like ‘carpet bombed a lot of bridges’ repeatedly while condescending all the screaming.
Evil corpos purchasing creativity just to see the soul flee.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Surprised, I am not.
They also don’t understand software.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone should be able to talk about their current employer as openly as Hays here
You have to remember that the only person who ever really wanted Microsoft to get into console gaming was Bill Gates and this was largely an extension of his own love of video games and obsession with getting MS into the living room. Other efforts included things like WebTV, MSNBC, and a device that led to the creation of TiVo. Ballmer cared about Bill’s legacy but once the two of them were gone nobody was left who gave a rat’s ass about Xbox.
He never liked gaming he just saw another market opportunity. Stop whitewashing fucking bill gates lol.
It’s neither untrue or whitewashing to point out the well documented fact that Gates like to play video games and perhaps you should check out my other comment in this thread.
Guess it’s all good Microsoft does an EEE on the AAA companies then I guess, because bill “liked to play video games”.
It’s just not relevant, so yes maybe he (like everyone) liked to play videogames, I should have put that differently, he wasn’t a game nerd.
You do know bill gates had a PR section dedicated to himself, right? Making the image of this “goofy guy”.
I don’t know why you’re looking for an argument but I didn’t say it was good and I’m officially done with this conversation.
Well go and rub bill gates shoulders then, maybe he’ll share his billions with you. I mean you’re not doing his publicity for free, right?
OK, you’re either a bot or a troll and I don’t have time for you so you are getting blocked now.
Bye!
They had vision and knew how to build a brand. The current CEO idea of branding is to name their products after a tool that absolutely no one will be using.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s probably worth pointing out that the Xbox was built on the ashes of the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast ran Windows CE, a precursor of sorts to Windows Mobile. Microsoft was perfectly happy using an already wounded Sega, who had mismanaged their last two console generations and lost a lot of users to the then fairly new PlayStation line, as the test bed for the software platforms that would eventually power the Xbox, though under a slightly different hardware platform. This is why, among other things, the Duke controller looks very much like a Dreamcast controller.
Like a lot of things that Gates did, he was standing on the shoulders of giants.
fwiw very few DC games used WinCE, though I do agree that the Xbox is basically the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/916412-dreamcast/79453073
Probably true, although Ballmer didn’t screw it up and Nadella did screw it up for one simple reason. He’s a 1 Cloud Pony. He came from the cloud and that’s all he really knows, and his narrow Senior VP perspective helped him extract earnings from cloud but nothing else at Microsoft.
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.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Thats something you use to stop competitors before they get big, but MS was never part of the game publisher circle and doesnt’t seem to try either.
Fear of missing out. It is institutionally ingrained into Microsoft when they were publicly burned for “missing out on the internet.”
It’s just like destroying all the health pickups in a multiplayer game so the other team can’t heal, I guess.
For a long time, their value proposition was “use us because what else can you do?” Trying to monololize the gaming industry by buying up whatever good studios they can is just a part of that.
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.
Because it’s run by fucking idiots with MBAs who have no connection whatsoever to the company’s profits and losses.
If you buy up all your potential competition, you have no competition.
Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard were never competition though
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.
Man those quotes from Chris Hays in the article hit hard.
I think I need to watch the video they are from tonight.
In the future they will have difficulty recruiting talent for projects and as a result will have to pay people way more like Meta because of the stigma.
Playing devil’s advocate, sometimes the blame is not solely on Microsoft.
Bethesda Softworks is a good example. They’d basically doomed Arkane to dev hell with that vampire game, and kept that little detail hidden during the acquisition; Microsoft gave them total leeway when the Arkane team supposedly hoped a “rescue” instead, and never got it.
It’s a hard argument though.
Take Phil Spencer. Just Phil Spencer. Thats an incredible crater, right there, and he failed upwards for it.
Yeah, because they are a business first and everything else, second. Business ruins everything.
Shareholders.
Businesses can do fine without them.
Yeah, this isn’t news and the studio owners who can cash big checks to sell don’t care.
I have talked to a mobile game Dev, a very drunker heart to heart. He had an India mobile game (like alto). He made about 120k in 5 years between two versions of the game. And then some tenent adjacent studio offered him 650k for the IP.
In his words “All I could think was that in 650k, my house would be paid. My education loan would be paid and I would still have enough money to ensure my kid goes to college and not worry about an education loan. I knew selling game would mean enshittification of my baby. But then i looked at my actual baby and I knew I had to betray the digital one”
That’s the first time I saw it from the dev point of view. He wanted to keep the project, but between choosing fans of his games that can’t keep a subreddit alive and doing right by no name, no face fan base vs 650k hard cash from a shitty studio that would concretely secure his family’s future. I am not sure if I would hold out.
I know it’s not the same with the studio Microsoft bought… But I can’t help but wonder people who sellout might not be such horrible pieces of shit that we imagine them to be.
When you’re young you tend to think accepting money means you’re a sellout.
When you’re an adult you think accepting money means you’re taking care of your family.
Also adults are less likely to think video games are the most important thing in the world.
Yeah, right? Like, that deal sounds like a no-brainer, to me.
Sure, the game could go viral and explode and make money hand over fist, and he’s missing out on that potential… But it probably won’t. And $650K is a lot of money, and he doesn’t need to keep grinding for years to make it happen.
With a paid off house, it’s easy to stay afloat just coasting until he finds something new that excites him.
Who wouldn’t take that deal?
It’s also plausibly enough money to make a new labor of love game for quite a while.
Like even if you are in a position where you want to take care of the players or whatever, $650k helps towards doing that. Even with your priorities in a weird order like that, it still seems obvious that you’d take the money and start a new project.
Absolutely. At the end of the day they’re just games. The rabid fans spewing vitriol have no perspective.
Microsoft has a lot more problems than that, but I suppose that’s the only one Steve Jobs would care about.
Steve engineers developed the iPod Touch in secret because they thought he would look at the ugly prototype and can the whole project Jobs
Steve so impossible to please as a boss that his worker developed an application for him to develop a calculator layout because nothing the other designer did was ever good enough Jobs.
Steve the iPad won’t get a calculator for fourteen years even though his corpse is long since dead and buried Jobs.
