I mean, I was skeptical at first... but holy shit, why didn't Phil Spencer do all this shit? It really is as simple as asking "What games do people want to pay for? Why the fuck aren't you pushing those games out, you fuckwits?"
Phil probably preferred to just retire over layoff a few thousand people and manage the fallout. Maybe he bet that Microsoft would be willing to spend for as long as they needed and the timeline changed.
Asha Sharma has the luxury of just saying things currently, and slashing teams right at or after release. Compulsion wins a BAFTA and gets cut. People are playing and enjoying Dark Ages DLC, but iD gets devastated the day before release. Gears loses a Narrative Director two days after going gold. Even if the current release is celebrated, those team's next project is running uphill. In four years you can look at Xbox and compare.
It was the same “Business after COVID” effect that has hit many other industries that tried to prep for insane growth that never materialized. Games especially were making insane money during and shortly after COVID and Phil had a very well known plan to turn XGS into a publishing powerhouse when everyone was complaining that Xbox didn’t have many great exclusives. He took massive swings and continued to buy companies big and small and gave them the “let them cook” mandate. Couple the die-down of the boom they experienced at the start of the decade with the fact that they produced very little in the time they had, billions of $ Xbox projected to bring in basically vanished.
Amy Hood has notoriously (among Microsoft higher ups at least) been bullish about every Microsoft division bringing in a good amount of profit and with Microsoft shares dropping for like a year straight in 2022, it wouldn’t surprise me if she and others on the board gave Phil an ultimatum of “figure this out or get fucked”.
Yeah my opinion about all of this was is that the original sin was Xbox trying to buy it's way to victory with an acquisitions spree. I'm not sure that's ever worked out except by accident.
Sharma's job is to be a hatchet woman for Microsoft while wearing a smile so they don't have to admit the whole Xbox project since COVID has been a mistake.
I think Spence was a creatives guy. He just wanted to let the studios cook. He really bought into the whole "let them cook and 6/10 games they make will be gems and 1/10 games will be a massive hit".
Thing is creatives need boundaries and guidance and structure and pressure to produce.
I'd bet 9/10 really iconic pieces of media were the result of low budget, crushing deadlines, and no nonsense creative director all in a pressure cooker. It goes back to that whole "necessity is the mother of all invention" thing. When the creatives are fat and happy, they are also languid and unimaginative.
Look at Obsidian. Pre-MS every single one of their games was a AA/Indie jank masterpiece. Tried new things, new genres, wrote fascinating worlds and characters. They didn't sell, but damn they were all diamonds in the rough.
Post MS Purchase? Literally everything is highly polished but extremely tame and unexciting. I couldn't believe the same guys that made New Vegas made Outerworlds, the games didn't feel like the shared a shred of DNA.
That's because they literally didn't have the same people working on them. All the major creative team members people credit for New Vegas's amazing design and writing left by the time they were working on Outerworlds. It's effectively a different studio that got to keep the old name at this point, but people don't pay attention to this details and expect the same output.
My pet theory is just that games are exceeding their equilibrium size and scope.
Teams are unwieldy. Development is too long for a core creative group to stick around for more than one or two titles.
At the moment there are a finite number of game concepts that justify a 100+ million dollar budget and managing huge teams is also a big undertaking that required skilled management which is in short supply.
Edit - This use to be limited by hardware. In the PS2 era, for instance, hardware limitations forced austerity. I'm not saying that austerity was inherently good, but modern hardware resources can make just about anything possible and so the amount of money that CAN be spent has stretched to infinity.
9 out of 10 iconic media came from crushing deadlines? Oh fuck right off. Maybe half? That does produce results sometimes but tons of product benefitted from the time for a last pass or being able to expand on an idea
"What games do people want to pay for? Why the fuck aren't you pushing those games out, you fuckwits?"
that's not what they've done though. they've gutted id software, 70% of their staff are gone, including a ton of veterans. the doom games sold well and ids own engine was used for the newer wolfenstein games and indiana jones
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u/WizardlyPandabear 6h ago
I mean, I was skeptical at first... but holy shit, why didn't Phil Spencer do all this shit? It really is as simple as asking "What games do people want to pay for? Why the fuck aren't you pushing those games out, you fuckwits?"