Eurogamer talking with some remaining Xbox devs and it’s going as well as you’d expect really.
”It’s hard to believe anything they say anymore”
Whilst there’s a lot upsetting around Microsoft gutting a huge portion of the games industry not because it’s not profitable but because it’s not increasingly profitable enough on a steep enough curve, it’s been incredibly frustrating watching the people who have bought into the idea of a “reset” that’s “streamlining” Xbox into an efficient hits machine just, well, buying into it at all. I’ve mentioned it before but I can’t see how Xbox can come back from this now.
I’ve just risen from my slumber so I’m not going to write thousands of words on this but with the exception of the small amount of people who would tweet a CEO compliments and think this is perfectly normal behaviour for a human being, Microsoft have trashed just about every other relationship they have on just about every level.
Their own developers know that it doesn’t matter anymore if they ship a successful game or not, Microsoft will lay them and their colleagues off in a heartbeat no matter what, with no rhyme nor reason beyond “because they can”.
Studios have had their workforces stripped down to unmanageable amounts and it is fundamentally clear many no longer have the staff or morale to continue to work at a healthy, sustainable, pace. Or at all in some cases.
When one of your star studios is announcing games four years in advance, in order to prove that people want them and they can and do ship games so please don’t hurt us ~ please leave us some staff! ~ this is not normally how anything works. This is a desperate move on the part of the studio and a shameful reflection upon how the new management are seen to operate.
Third party developers have known sales on Xbox are shit for ages now. Unless a publisher or Xbox are covering the costs of working on Xbox, that’s effort people could be putting into something that helps keep the lights on instead. Or buying lunch, whatever. Throw in a completely uncertain future for Xbox and there’s no good reason to put that work in. As Sony have discovered in the past, the amount of work to recover from this is years long, substantial and needs people who can be trusted by the third party devs not to fuck them over. That is not happening with Xbox right now or anytime soon. Things can and will only get worse for Xbox here.
Customers are getting front row seats to the chaos with ever changing decisions on what Xbox costs to use, what services Xbox is willing to offer and for what, and watching the entire ecosystem be gutted by Microsoft’s swingeing cuts and the games suffer. You can’t “do a good Halo” your way out of this one. Especially whilst continuing to bleed the customers dry so they really feel it in the wallet.
What remains of the games press is, for the most part, sitting there watching all this unfold in complete horror. The amount of people compelled to give Xbox anything close to positive, “normal” coverage is vanishingly small.
There is no one place Xbox have not fucked things up. All that is left is distrust and a small handful of weirdo CEO tweeting fans. There is no functioning Xbox ecosystem to “reset”, everything is (bluntly) completely fucked on every discernible level and the recent egregious increases in the costs of hardware pretty much ensure any attempts to salvage anything from this become borderline impossible anyway because who wants to pay an extortionate amount for a console with so little developer support, so few games and a willingness to keep asking for increasing amount of money for fewer services? Yeah, it’s just those weirdos who tweet CEOs compliments left for that one.
Xbox are fucked, man.
