CrimsonGear80 posted...
Phil and his team run the division. the higher ups may tell them what they want to see from their investments, but at the end of the day they make the decisions on how to make money off these investments, who to cut, who to close and what to cancel. They are just as responsible for all this, IMO.
https://www.ign.com/articles/phil-spencer-and-the-battle-for-xboxs-soul
I spoke to two former longtime Xbox employees, separately, and both lamented the current state of the business.
One told me, prior to this weeks awful studio closures, I had lengthy conversations with a bunch of Xbox founders, and we all came to the same conclusion: its no longer Xbox, but Microsoft Gaming. Ouch.
The other chatted with me at length after the Bethesda bloodbath, and believes Xbox is now too big to quickly or easily get its house in order. There is just too much surface area. You have, effectively, three huge companies at play and Microsoft never really finished [the] integration with Bethesda. [And] Activision is like three times the size Xbox was. They added, Xbox 360 launched with a few hundred people. Last I heard Xbox is now almost 30,000 people.
And that growth has led to, in this Xbox veterans opinion, increased oversight and meddling from further up the Microsoft food chain. The reason this seems so inconsistent with previous Xbox leadership team statements is that these decisions probably aren't being made by Phil. This is all getting dictated by [Microsoft CEO] Satya [Nadella] and [Microsoft CFO] Amy Hood, and it all stems from the Activision acquisition.
The long-tenured ex-Xboxer continued: The situation Xbox was in when they made this call was much different. [They] couldn't keep consoles in stock, making money hand-over-fist with Game Pass growth [the Activision acquisition] seemed like a no-brainer.
"Now, console sales are down. Post-COVID recession. Game Pass slowing. The acquisition was more costly and time-consuming than anyone expected. And the focus on fighting the FTC probably cost them time they would have spent thinking through the people and studio implications.
I 100% believe this is a board-level decision. Xbox was a huge profit center, so Satya approved a huge merger. Now, games are slowing, and Microsoft stock is skyrocketing and there is no way Satya is going to let Xbox drag it down.
This is all my opinion, of course, butI'm fairly certain these are not decisions being made only by Xbox leadership.
Thats not to absolve Spencer for his role in all of this (unlike the tone-deaf Wont someone think of the multi-millionaire executives? response of former Xbox higher-up Mike Ybarra). He is, after all, the person in charge of the entire organization. The buck stops with him. The Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard acquisitions happened on his watch. As such, he is no more shielded from criticism for being, by most accounts (including my own), a nice guy than the star professional athlete is for underperforming on the field/court despite regularly signing autographs for kids before games.
So even sources within the gaming industry believe that there's a power struggle at Microsoft, with Phil Spencer and the Xbox team trying to go one way but Satya Nadella and the Microsoft higher-ups trying to go another way. It makes perfect sense, considering how much praise Spencer showered on Hi-Fi Rush for its success in the past only for this to happen now, seemingly against his own wishes. Obviously as the article says, Spencer and the Xbox division aren't blameless in all of this, considering it was the ABK acquisition that attracted more of the higher-ups' scrutiny on the Xbox division in the first place. But to put
all
of the blame on him and say that the higher-ups above him at Microsoft aren't influencing things is just incorrect.