this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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What is the point of Xbox? (www.eurogamer.net)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 62 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I thought, yes we can. I said, look, just give us four years, proper finance, give us the chance Mass Effect has, Skyrim has, the games at the time. They're getting four years and a lot of budget. Give us that, and we'll give you something that'll get you your players. Nah, you've had three shots and you've only tripled the money. It's not good enough. Fuck off. That's what I was annoyed about.

Fuck man, that's like, summing up my entire corporate career right there. I want to buy this man a beer, I feel this so hard.

[–] million 34 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Good quote. Here is more of it for context:

Fable was profitable - "highly profitable", Lionhead's Simon Carter told Eurogamer - but in a now too-familiar story, it and its genre was seen by Microsoft as just not profitable enough. "That category is not the biggest category on the planet," said Robbie Bach, who was the President of Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft before Don Mattrick assumed the role. "It's not soccer. It's not American Football. It's not a first-person shooter sized category. So at a commercial level, I would say it was successful, but not wildly so."

Wildly successful was what Microsoft was after. A pitch for Fable 4 was rejected. "It was like, you've reached your cap of players for RPG on Xbox and you need to find a way to double that, and you're not going to do it with RPG," Fable's art director John McCormack told Eurogamer at the time. "I thought, yes we can. I said, look, just give us four years, proper finance, give us the chance Mass Effect has, Skyrim has, the games at the time. They're getting four years and a lot of budget. Give us that, and we'll give you something that'll get you your players. Nah, you've had three shots and you've only tripled the money. It's not good enough. Fuck off. That's what I was annoyed about." (Worth noting: Skyrim went on to sell 63m copies, as of June 2023, The Witcher 3 over 50m.)

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Just absolutely greedy fucks that think entropy doesn't exist and everything infinitely scales.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What is wild to me is that profit alone isn’t sufficient.

Like. You’re paying people to do a thing and you’re getting more money back.

Why shutter it?

Like oh no I can’t make MORE money off of this might as well make nothing?

[–] GraniteM 6 points 4 months ago

It's not enough to make money.

It's not enough to make more money than last year.

You've got to make more money and at a faster rate of increase than last year, every single year, or else as far as the execs are concerned, you're a fucking failure. Hence, everything getting worse, more expensive, and generally shittier all the time.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm just loving the amount of bad press Microsoft is deservedly getting.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think the studio closures was just the last straw. Like they spent almost $100 billion and they’ve made NOTHING. Like not one goddamn thing.

Say what you will about Sony and Nintendo but they have output and they care about gaming because they have to, it’s the only way they make money.

Microsoft could shutter their gaming division tomorrow and they would save money, not lose it. Whatever exec championed the buyouts for Game Pass is clearly gone or asleep at the wheel. So the end result is they own WoW, Candy Crush and CoD that print money and a bunch of franchises that haven’t seen a good release in 10+ years.

The fact that they bought inExile, Obsidian and Bethesda and didn’t immediately start work on a Fallout 1/2 remake or an FNV sequel is evidence enough they they have no fucking clue what they’re doing. How does a company own so many studios and make no games!?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Say what you will about Sony and Nintendo but they have output and they care about gaming because they have to, it’s the only way they make money.

You are aware that Sony makes lots of other things besides games too?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Take a look at Sony’s annual reports and then get back to me. PlayStation is the engine that drives the company.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Maybe you should take your own advice, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/297533/sony-sales-worldwide-by-business-segment/ for the latest available year there (2022) the business segment "Game and network services" is only around 26 billion out of 88 billion total.

[–] Kelly 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

The sale figures are a bit misleading as the different sections also have different costs (sales make games look more important).

The corporate reports are archived here, and the equivalent per-section breakdown is on page 37 of the 2023 report.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/

When comparing operating revenue (i.e. profit) the breakdown is:

section billion yen
games and network services 250
music 263
pictures 119
entertainment technology & services 180
imaging & sensing solutions 212
financial services 234
other 17

So it looks like they made a little more profit from music that year.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago
  1. Revenue is not profit.
  2. Gaming is by far the biggest bar in that graph.

I stand by my point.

[–] big_slap 25 points 4 months ago (1 children)

why don't they close down 343 next? they haven't launched a good game in over a decade by now. that should have been high on the list of closures.

[–] ShadowCat 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

To be honest, as a huge Halo fan, I was surprised when seeing those studios closed that 343 wasn't one of them. The studio is just cursed, even a leadership change isn't going to save them.

Either make Halo games from all the studios under Microsoft or start a new one with people who are actual fans of the franchise

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

There's so much potential for a Halo game that isn't just a shooter.

I think a survival horror game based around the Flood would be amazing- something Dead Space-y but Halo. That would be incredibly difficult to make, and it's never going to happen, but it would be cool.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Or a Mass Effect scale RPG

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Hell even a Bethesda scale RPG, set it in a city during the Human covenant war where you have to move around using utility areas kinda similar to the subways in Fallout 3. Just dont give it to Bethesda, I dont trust them not to fuck it up after Starfield.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Actual Bethesda or Bethesda adjacent? Because Fallout 3 and 4 use warped map scaling while NV uses actual scale

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Eithers fine IMO, maybe a bit more vertical. Im just saying around that size give or take.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, the franchise has been on life support since Bungie left, they should have just licensed the IP to other studios.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I don't entirely agree with that- I enjoyed some of the 343 games. They're not the same quality as the original trilogy, but I would describe all of them but Halo 5 as 'good'. Not great or amazing, but good.

I would love to see them license the IP out more, though, just so we could see more variety of games. I like Halo but "he kills all the aliens and doesnt afraid of anything" gets a bit old after the fifth time or so.

The only other Halo games are Halo Wars- which personally I enjoyed a lot- and the Spartan Assault twinstick shooter games that I never played.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

As games sure, they were alright. But they werent Halo games. Its one of the best trilogies of all time and ODST and Reach were also great additons. I think 343 dropped the ball massively and at that point just licensing the IP could have yielded some good games too as it was already tarnished anyway.

[–] woelkchen 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

"id Software, you do Halo now!"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Id Software makes Doom skinned Quake games these days

[–] woelkchen 3 points 4 months ago

They make whatever Microsoft tells them. That's how being a subsidiary works.

[–] JimmyChanga 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Excellently written article that really sums up why I'm finally done with Xbox once my gamepass runs out. Been holding off buying a ps5 but they'll be gaining a new customer for my console gaming.

[–] Son_of_dad 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Lol it's funny cause after this week I've been thinking of dropping p PlayStation for Xbox. Ships passing each other in the night

[–] JimmyChanga 4 points 4 months ago

Gpu off the trade on from game pass and extended with the reward points has been great value. But their current strategy and the games I can't play on it that are on ps5 is tempting me, also about to upgrade my gaming PC, so maybe steam etc e will satisfy that

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

It passes butter.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Destroying competition.

[–] woelkchen 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Buying the competition and then closing them is technically achieving it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Except now that talent joins or forms more competition

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

I would call that killing competition because they dont actually achieve the stuff they did, they just destroy them

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

What's the point of consoles when PCs exist? I don't understand how we have spent the entire modern PC era still clinging to locked down, limited consoles. And PCs aren't expensive if you're not buying some laughable top of the line garbage that runs games at super-ultra-mega-hyper high settings at 50billion pixels @ 4,096Hz.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Yes they are. A PS5 costs £389.99.

What gaming PC can you build for that?

[–] Schmuppes 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

That sorta money doesn't even buy you a great GPU these days. Maybe a decent one. And then you only need a little more money for a CPU, RAM, Mainboard, storage and a power supply. And if you're feeling fancy, maybe a case as well.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I love how you specifically say "gaming PC" because I know you and every so-called "gamer" these days have to have some over the top, expensive, overheating, power-sucking pile of trash to run games at ridiculous resolutions/refresh rates with blinding, ugly graphics full of so many garbage lighting effects and muddy megatextures that the game is nearly unplayable.

If you can't run a game on a ~400 UKBucks machine, the game isn't worth playing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Why even bother with a PC when I have a stick and a hoop?

If it can't be played with a few bits of wood and plastic, then the game isn't worth playing.

[–] steeznson 2 points 4 months ago

I got a series s for £150 when my PC couldn't run Elden Ring properly. It seemed cost effective vs a PC upgrade for playing the latest games.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It's cheaper than a PC and has almost all the same games (with new releases)?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Yeah, but my PC will last much longer.