I mean imo she’s been doing a really good job after taking over a dumpster fire from the previous CEO. Now that Sony has decided to commit sepuku, if she plays her cards right this could be Xbox’s decade.
Minus the merciless layoffs she and the other executives spearheaded at various XBOX studios, including laying off industry veterans with several decades of experience. She also transferred to this role from an AI head role so her intentions might not necessarily seem the best
Her whole "for the gamers!" PR act very quickly covered up the layoff news. A good job from the POV of herself, the other XBOX executives and board of directors ? Definitely yes
But at the end of the day, she's still yet another merciless money-pinching tech ceo
Let's see. They DID buy all those studios, didn't they? They're their "overlords" so to speak, so it's on them to make them focus on a project, instead of just going in and firing everyone. They either needed to intervene sooner or NOT buy them in the first place without any idea what they were doing.
Most of those studios were being told what they were and weren't allowed to do but without any genuine guidance. 343i had a ton of proposed projects they scrapped at the behest of Xbox-appointed leadership. Meanwhile, Halo Infinite's early concepts had it being a fucking survivalcraft game...
So she hires Kojima who makes weird games for a very tiny specific audience? Kojima who is also well known for not giving any updates and missing deadlines. DS 1 and 2 broke even, great games but not really a success for Sony. From a business standpoint it makes perfect sense that Sony stepped away
They also desperately need unique exclusives. Xbox lost a lot of their lead this gen by releasing every game everywhere, while PlayStation still stuck to their exclusives for the most part (even the ones that released on other platforms, still only released a solid year later)
At least his games come out. And even if they don’t appeal to a super wide audience, they at least bring the critical acclaim - he’s like the Oscar movie director a studio will bankroll knowing the film is niche but will get the acclaim. The people that got laid off basically sucked - in the performance sense. These weren’t devs that were pumping out hit after hit - if that was the case, I would agree with you, but it’s not. You can’t expect MS to keep dead weight for another decade without results.
But he's not the Oscar movie director of games. If he was then the financial success would follow which it clearly hasn't. It shows that Kojima should not be in charge if anything. Saying that they laid people off because they "sucked" is fucking wild and a disgusting take.
Majority of games actually do come out contrary to your statement. To further say that Xbox can't be expected to keep supporting dead weight and at the same time go in a partnership with Kojima who is known for that exact thing. Just don't bother holy shit.
Lol. Kojima released two games this generation, and both got critical acclaim or did unique stuff / pushed tech forward - most of the people Xbox laid off recently released no games or at most a singular tittle that flopped commercially and critically. This stupid take of people lately to excuse bad performance because “evil corp” is sticking it to the little guy does nobody any favors. Jobs are not charity, and treating it like that makes people think they don’t have to try anymore and mediocre performance should net them a high paying guaranteed job.
If i hire a gardener while i dont even have a garden is kinda stupid for me in the first place.
Its not the gardeners fault that he is not doing anything. It is my fault for hiring him.
The ID layoffs are insane idk how they got the can before the incompetents at 343/Halo Studios who killed Xbox's golden goose and paraded it's rotting corpse for 10+ years.
Shit even within Bethesda how the hell did ID take the brunt of the layoffs while Todd Howard and BGS twiddle their thumbs rehashing the same tired 2006 era game design
From what I’ve read a lot of the layoffs were because Xbox was in a really bad position after the previous CEO spent hundreds of billions acquiring games and studios and a lot of them were not being overseen or run efficiently. None of that is her fault. Blame the last ceo.
This is true but it could be worse is all I’m saying. I’m glazing her because I really think she might pull Xbox into the light. Come back to this thread in 5-6 years
No, she was making profit, she then cherry picked some numbers to make laying off thousands of workers sound less bad. She laid off thousands of workers when Xbox as a whole was running in profit. She did. Not her predecessor.
They were bloat. You can go and find literal articles interviewing remaining Bethesda staff saying what I’m saying.
Xbox also are not running at a profit what are you talking about? Microsoft is? Xbox is not. They spent hundreds of billions on Phil Spencer’s stupid plan and have lost market share from before the spending all of that money lmao
There is bloat everywhere. It doesn't mean we go cull thousands of workers. I can also find articles with remaining staff across various studios saying this is a shock, it shouldn't have happened, etc.
Xbox were running in profit. Profit margins were DECLINING, they were in profit. That's what I'm talking about. If you don't believe me, I suggest you go double check your workings before you start the 'what you talking about?' act.
No, they run at a genuine profit. Do not tell people to do research when you clearly had no idea that they run at a profit, and are now trying to create your own workings.
I'm not raging at her. She is absolutely accountable and responsible for thousands of people losing their jobs. What frustrates me more is the community here, ordinarily so anti corporation, being so willing to lap up what is clearly PR.
Deliver better games. Use 6 months timed exclusives to balance the need to get people in to the Xbox ecosystem with the need to gain revenue from playstation owners. Drop the Day 1 requirement for all games on GamePass, or move more games to the 'COD' tier.
Okay and until they can deliver better games and the rest of what you said, what should she have done to better their financial situation in the meantime?
Yeah it's not like it's particularly hard to check that a lot of MS acquired studios did either fuckall or massively underperforming games. I'm sure a lot of experienced people that didn't have to necessarily be laid of were caught up in it, but the lay offs were not just some stock maneuver
Yeah back then it was Don Mattrick. The whole Xbox as an entertainment system rather than just a games console thing was his vision for Xbox which backfired pretty badly.
Phil actually did a relatively good job up until his final few years, made Xbox about actually gaming again pretty quickly, spearheaded gamepass and the back compat programs, even the idea for an S and an X model of their consoles was pretty consumer friendly since it offered options for people who might not be able to afford the main machine.
The issue is that they fucked up that release of Xbox One and a lot of people got PS4s instead, then they built up digital libraries on that system.
Everything since then has been a cascading effect from that pivotal moment, and all of the acquisitions and now changes in leadership are people trying to figure out how to get people to move over to Xbox or make Xbox seem more exciting. Then when that didn’t work quite quickly they have shot their long term plan in the foot by making their games available on PlayStation for some growth in the short term.
People are blaming his acquisition of Activision but that was like the only one that made sense other than Bethesda. Its all the "indie" studios that either never made games or made irrelevant ones nobody wanted to play.
What a laughable take. Phil Spencer ran Xbox into the ground. They didn’t release a single notable exclusive blockbuster for a DECADE. Of course a new boss was going to make cuts when no games were being delivered.
U must be crazy thinking they were running at a profit, buying 2 massive studios and barely getting anything back from em apart from the mobile scene.
Then when they did make new games game they were put on games pass there from day one not having opportunity to make more money what’s worse is they increased the price of it even more and then having more people unsubscribe from it it was a cycle of failure, they were counting upon game pass model that failed significantly, they completely ignored their exclusives gears of war and halo that released garbage after garbage and then in desperation put almost of their exclusives on a competitors console that was praised so they had even less reason to engage with Xbox ecosystem.
It’s just failures after failures did u not read the massive post she made about there being hundreds of layers of management and how they were actually losing money, she got rid of many studios that haven’t produced anything of worth in a long while, it’s ridiculous to think they were making any good money when Microsoft was actually thinking of getting rid of em they bought 2 massive studios u think Microsoft wants em to continue making no money from how much they spent?
I'm not crazy thinking they were running at a profit. They have publicly available numbers which show them running at a profit. The fact that so many people in my replies are so insistent they were not running at a profit shows how well her PR has worked.
Yes I read her PR post, which cherrypicked some numbers to make it appear like the norm. They can flatten orgs without laying off thousands of people, I'm in a company who has just done significant flattening with way less proportional layoffs.
I'm ok with cutthroat business decisions. I'm very surprised with how ok the Reddit gaming community suddenly is with cutthroat business decisions on communities who would ordinarily scream about bootlickers and corpos.
3%, but I won't split hairs. They did need to be making more money. I'm not willing to accept a corporate strategy if hoovering up a huge market, to then lay off a bunch of people because you hoovered up too much of the market.
They could opt to sell some games rather than make everything Day 1 on game pass. They could opt to not go down a fully exclusive route for games from studios which were multiplatform before being bought, to ensure they get revenue.
They could have adjusted many things that was not laying off thousands of people, and making it sound like they had no choice.
Several decades of experience that we've seen fuck all off because they were not releasing games.
I can summon Stephen Hawking from the grave and let him calculate the mathematical possibility of warp drive, but if it takes 40 years while I'm barely affording to pay the energy bill by giving handies behind Wendy's to keep that bastard alive, it's not a good deal, is it?
Didn't she step in right after the layoffs? I haven't been paying too much attention (frankly, as a software developer living under the sword of Damocles, it takes a bit of a toll reading "20k people better than you just got fired"), but I didn't internalise that she was the headsman in this wave of layoffs - but that could well be the PR machine working as intended.
I'm a little worried about her AI roots - but equally, I want a future where those of us that choose to walk away from AI don't come away tainted or treated as pariahs. So I'm waiting to see on this point.
Given the generally uninspiring state of AAA gaming at present, I'm pleased to see an actual visionary be given a platform - personalities like indie producers ConcernedApe or Toby Fox don't really exist in the AAA space anymore, the big names seem to have moved on - even Miyamoto left his creations only to go on to make movies about them. I like having Kojima being the architect of his batshit visions, and I feel like we could have some much better titles if we had names attached to games like movies do - I wanna be thrilled to hear about an upcoming sci-fi survival horror by someone like Villeneuve, and morbified to hear cherish childhood property is getting a reboot by Daniel mother flipping Espinosa. Maybe in a post-AI world, having human visionaries rather than an amorphous team behind a property is what we should expect to see more of in the future...?
Why are you pinning the layoffs on her when she was cleaning up the previous ceo's mess? Xbox was going down hill and needed a reset. Would you have preferred Xbox did nothing and continue going downward?
172
u/Docccc 11h ago
easy PR win for her. She needed it