I wonder if he’d still have that sentiment if they had twice as many users as PS4, instead of the way it is now. I mean, this is Microsoft.
That is exactly what I expected the first reply to be. I just wasn’t sure who would post it.
Well it wasn’t you, so I win.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1365572-REG/microsoft_zq9_00001_xbox_one_s_gaming.html
Xbox one S for $199 btw.
I think he’s probably hoping to tone down that adversarial tone in the gaming audience out of which seems to come the worst kinds of misogyny and shithead behavior.
I’ve said this before in other places on the forum but man, perusing other fan communities vs gaming communities (not this one) is like night and day.
Microsoft thought they could dictate to the industry and their customers with the success of the 360. Turned out to be hubris.
Same thing Sony did during the PS2 to PS3 transition.
Ultimately Phil S. is spot on in my mind. It’s about the games and art. I’m fortunate enough to afford all the consoles so it isn’t a huge issue. Cross save and play would both be great though.
I’m happy Microsoft is doing things like the adaptive controller though. There are many people who will be able to enjoy games more readily with that innovation.
Even @divedivedive has to be realistic about this. If they were on top, he wouldn’t be saying this. It’s also something good to say from a PR perspective atm because Sony’s been really heavy on the walled garden with their online stuff and not allowing cross play. They have the exact opposite tact in use at the moment to protect their advantage.
I said in the E3 thread I’m glad they’re trying and I truly am glad to see that they recognize they need first-party games, but they’ve also said that before and invested and then tore it all down so let’s see where this all ends up. Right now they are still only really selling Halo, Forza, Gears and Minecraft.
Microsoft definitely needs better management of their first party Studios though. Just looking at the results, it sounds like they do a mixture of being too hands on and being too hands off at other times. They need to learn from Sony somehow, and how they manage their studios.
Ensemble Studios was a great example, they greenlit a bunch of projects there that they later decided not to go with, and they let the studio grow and grow and then suddenly you could see it had a huge burn rate with so many employees, and yet, very little output of released games. Other times, they have a company like Bungie who feel like they will have to Halo games in perpetuity so they want to get out. The list just goes on and on. Somehow Sony has this all sorted out. Either that, or they got extremely lucky. But I’m betting they have a better process, both on what they allow a studio to do, and what they don’t allow.
It’s good that they’re building up their first party studios again, but they need to figure out the magic sauce at keeping them as good, productive, creative studios.
We all saw this train wreck coming back in 2011 or so when they started axing studios.
MS gets in these weird hubris cycles. I distinctly recall after they won the browser war and embedded IE into Windows a high-ranking exec say something to the media along the lines that they didn’t need to work on the browser anymore. They won.
And then Firefox and Chrome later come along and eat their lunch, and suddenly browser development is important to MS again. Too late, though, MS.
Even me?! My god. I don’t really know what there is to be realistic about though. I do agree that what a massive, faceless, global corporation says is much less important than what it does, but in this particular case I don’t yet see a lot of daylight between them.
I will add this though: I think Phil Spencer is the best thing to happen to Xbox since maybe Ed Fries. He reports to Nadella now, so Xbox basically sits alongside Windows and Office as pillars of the company. They’re obviously investing in the future. If we had to endure Mattrick and a few weird years of dithering to get there, we’ll maybe it was worth it. Will it last? Of course not. Should be a fun ride though.
Thurrott:
Careful. If we start talking about how it’s all about the games and the art, we might start asking why we need the single use appliances in the first place…
Every console manufacturer does, and it’s arguable every market leader in tech does.
Truth.
I mentioned this earlier, maybe in this thread or another, but the fact that this renewed dedication to first-party studios including lots of acquisitions is timed with Phil becoming a Corporate VP reporting directly to the CEO is not a coincidence.
Even back when Xbox 360 was on top, gaming was never a division which reported directly to the CEO. Gaming at Microsoft was always previously hamstrung by various other corporate interests, whether it was stuck in the “entertainment and devices” division of the Windows org, or it reported directly to Windows itself, or whatever else. Gaming at Microsoft has never been able to stand entirely on its own, with its own significant budget to do whatever it needs to do to expand, without serving other corporate masters along the way.
Even after Phil Spencer took over gaming a few years ago, he was still beholden to other corporate interests, limited budgets, and the mistakes of the past. He’s done what he could possibly do over those years in terms of fixing the platform and steering things back in the right direction, but he didn’t have the budget for first-party studios. That’s why he had to close so many studios, and the remaining studios didn’t have full creative control or the resources they needed.
Now, finally, Phil Spencer is a corporate VP, reporting directly to Satya, and almost entirely self-directed to do whatever he needs to grow the business. These moves announced during E3 - 5 new first-party studios, ongoing work on a next generation console, a cloud streaming service to enable you to play everywhere else, and more - are the result of that corporate restructuring and the resources Phil now has to dedicate to gaming.
If they were on top, Mattrick would still be in charge, TVs would all be operated through Kinect 2.0, and Phil wouldn’t have the opportunity.
Here’s the problem. Phil has been promising a huge investment in first party for a long time, but it took over 3 years before he apparently was able to actually get any money to do so. It’s too little too late for this gen, and all this acquisitions should be seen as preparations for next generation. My concern with Microsoft has always been that the Xbox division is beholden to a larger organization that is at time apathetic, hostile and/or interested in exploiting the Xbox business for tangential concerns. Phil may have gotten the money this year, but Microsoft leadership could easily change their mind a few years from now, just as they’ve done many times in the past. Right now they are running out the clock on this generation with a token number of major franchise games because sales didn’t meet expectations.
That’s not the attitude I want from a platform holder. Rather than addressing the shortcomings of their first party in stride this gen, they’ve focused on cheap wedge issues to try and paint Sony in a bad light. They’ve gone so far as to treat millions of paying Minecraft customers on PlayStation as second class citizens denying them access to many enhancements that have been patched into other versions under the pretext of the no crossplay “problem”. Frankly, that in my mind is way more hostile than Sony declining to extend crossplay support to their direct competitors.
I don’t understand the Minecraft connection here at all. Minecraft supports cross platform play everywhere except for PlayStation because Sony is blocking it. It’s not Microsoft’s prerogative to completely reimplement major parts of the game just for PlayStation - things they don’t need to do on any other platform - just because of Sony’s ridiculous limitation.
Today’s kerffluffle with Fortnite is yet another example where the ball is entirely in Sony’s court.
All platforms required specialized programming and PlayStation owners paid the same money everyone else did. It’s absurd to punish them in an effort to make Microsoft’s competitor look bad by withholding the new rendering system and increased world size, etc, because they can’t support a completely unrelated networking component. They’ve sold millions on PS4 and this is Microsoft so it’s disingenuous to blame a lack of resources at the 4.5 billion dollar acquisition. They’re happy to continue selling the game and profiting from DLC on PlayStation, but it’s shitty to treat long time Mojang customers like that for a PR win.