Xbox Is Reportedly Axing Many Studios from Its Portfolio, Including Arkane Lyon, Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory

Peter_Brosdahl

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It’s a scary time to be a game studio that is a part of the Xbox Games Studio family, as layoffs loom and rumors circulate as to who is on the chopping block. It’s no secret that Xbox is facing tough decisions moving forward in a bid to survive and flourish. From a change in […]

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How is anything MS in talks about ' survival' and such. I dont get it.

Microsoft has never seemed to understand why it was making video games. Perhaps it never will.
Games take a constant supply of human invention and creative risk and turn it into a meaningful connection with players, which then makes money. For some reason, this business model breaks Microsoft's brain, even though its rivals Sony and Nintendo have been demonstrably and quite unmysteriously successful at it for decades.

Spencer's kindness was cruel.

Asha Sharma, the new Xbox CEO is a sharp knife, as unsentimental as Spencer was indulgent, and she's been sent in to clean up his mess: a bloated, barely profitable business suffering a catastrophic loss of market share in consoles and attempting to compete with Steam on PC. (Good luck with that.) She'll take the heat for these latest cuts, but the blame for them lies with the poor decisions made by Spencer and compounded by his boss, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Only making big, safe bets isn't the answer to Xbox's woes. Sharma doesn't have a lot of options. Sure, she has to make cuts, and she needs big games. But more than that, she needs a whole new way of thinking about the game business that isn't mired in a quarter-century of wrongheaded decisions and strategic confusion.

https://www.polygon.com/xbox-micros...ueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
 
Based on their own statements, and rumors, it sounds like Matt and Asha have been told fix it soon or else.

Everyone's all smiles except for those getting laid off and MS has mostly been mum on not really letting on how bad things have gotten while some have speculated for years about this as MS shuffled numbers for Xbox in its financials (I seem to remember a story about this around 6 months to a year ago).

MS worried about survival, nope not in the slightest but if these two don't manage to turn things around Xbox could end up being something entirely different from what we know now. Essentially a company that exists as a brand with no hardware and very little software. How many studios do they plan to keep and how do they hope to keep release timelines in check if too many are let go? It was just the other day someone said they wanted to cut down on long release windows and you can't achieve both, or may be you can if you replace them all with AI.

I also find it strange that things have gone silent regarding the gaming handheld front after the Ally Xbox. Intel has things planned but nary a peep from MS regarding its Xbox push that began with ASUS.
 
As a PC gamer In want the gaming division of MS to flourish because they will be making games for PC's. I don't think PC first is the path to profitability, but it definitely isn't PC forgotten.
 
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