Anyone who has a shred of knowledge about big business knew this was coming the moment Microsoft started pursuing Zenimax. As I mentioned elsewhere in this forum, consolidation is generally a bad thing in any industry, not just videogames. It's bad for customers, bad for innovation, bad for product/service quality, bad for employees, bad for pretty much everyone but shareholders.
It's the same everywhere whether you run airlines, make electronic fuel injectors for automobiles, raise dairy cows, whatever.
The more troubling aspect of Microsoft's way about doing this is a what appears to be an unveiling of massive hypocrisy. Just a day after shuttering Tango Gameworks, authors of the award-winning surprise hit
Hi-Fi Rush, Xbox Games head Matt Booty told employees in a town hall meeting: "We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards."
The mixed messages go up to 11.
www.pcgamer.com
This isn't just garden variety tone deafness or a slip of the tongue. This shows a massive disconnect at the C-suite level: that they have lost control and don't have a solid strategy how to grow their gaming business.
Earlier when
Redfall showed signs of being a dud, Phil Spencer took some blame saying that Microsoft didn't pay close enough attention to the game's troubled development and didn't offer enough resources; he pledged to do better in the future. A year later, they shutter that studio as well. That's not just an "oopsie, my bad" move. That's either hypocrisy or outright lying. I wouldn't dare bet either way.
So with these two clowns (and others) running the
show circus, anyone care to bet whether or not there will be more layoffs in the near future?
And while there's no deafeningly loud clown parade over at Sony Interactive Entertainment, there are also signs there that the people at the helm don't know where to steer their ship. There's evidence that the subscription models offered by both Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Pass Premium are reaching the limit for audience growth.
Anyhow it is unlikely that everything has been tidied up and we can go back to the videogame industry of 1995, 2005 or 2015.
There will be more Xbox portfolio butchering in the future. The only question is who.
In the end my hunch is that Microsoft will capitulate before Sony. The next Xbox console will likely be their last hardware release. If they can't turn around their software title business (where they make the lion's share of their gaming profits), most likely Microsoft will sell off their vastly devalued Xbox properties to some other publisher and exit the consumer marketplace entirely.
This is also a good lesson to remind people that it's not about specs, how many polygons you can throw on the screen, how many gigabytes of texture you can load into memory. Of the three main consoles, Xbox Series X is the most powerful if you put the spec sheets side by side. Yet Playstation 5 outsells Xbox worldwide, in some markets at a 5:1 ratio.
And all the while Nintendo -- with their frequently derided wimpy "children's toy" Switch -- is eating Sony and Microsoft's lunch.
