He’s aged so much he looks like a prospector who has been struggling to find any gold at all …

When xbox first hit the scene it was a breath of fresh air. Now its just a stale fart, its time for it to die.

That's a 360

The console wars have ended. The PC is victorious.

Microsoft is quietly sunsetting everything they cant make money on with AI.

xbone was the beginning of the end. when the enshittification kicked in before we had a word for it.

This isn't new. I heard them say years ago "yeah Sony won the console war but that doesn't matter" implying cloud gaming

No, the new player in the game, AI killed everything.

My PC will still boot when the people turn on the data centers in the next 6 months. Can AI say the same?

Enshitification has been a thing since the 1940s. I remember in the 80s my grandma saying she used to get pretzels from the corner store. Big soft gooey chewey pretzels.

Now, in the 80s, I could only get a factory made crunchy pretzel rod.

And today? Unless you're buying a whole bag, you can't get pretzels at all.

I'm honestly not surprised because Microsoft can't manifest a win (even though most users know what could be done), they are immune to thinking out of the box...They are so high on fumes of burning insane amounts of money on AI. That will fail, and will be egg on those fuckers face!

They’re sunsetting the platform alright, but nothing about it is quiet

So, everything?

It feels that way. Every ongoing product MS has feels decrepit and ready to collapse.

Xbox as a 3rd party publisher can succeed. As a console vendor, it's too late to stop the multiplatform strategy this gen. They're not Nintendo. At least on the Wii U, Nintendo was still releasing great games and the 3DS sold like 80 million units and Nintendo were also releasing great games there and all those studios would converge on the Switch. They can't be serious launching a console without a great launch year lineup of exclusives marketed well to convince people that they won't cut tail and run if a new console doesn't take off.

The advice for the new Xbox CEO that I believe in is to rip the bandage off and embrace 3rd party publishing. Timings for a new console seem awful. Fable is supposed to release this year. Forza Horizon Japan this year. Obsidian has already released their two big games last year. Perfect Dark cancelled. Forza Motorsport studio seemingly on life support rather than working on a new entry. New Gears of War should release soon. Elder Scrolls VII I'm not betting on that before the 2030s. Also these unreleased announced games are marketed as multiplatform already. Is it going to be another attempt at a Halo as the launch title after a string of crowd goes mild Halo releases. The hasty media work being done now with the new CEO is going to be thrown back in her face within a few years as some sort of hypocrite critique rather than someone speaking before they built up their Xbox strategy and was pretty much kind of winging it on short notice

This is for the best. As someone who is forced to work with a lot of Microsoft infrastructure let me tell you things have never been this broken before. They keep doubling down on AI and it simply doesn't work.

I feel you brother. It's bad. They are pushing AI features at the speed of light but forgetting that other things need attention too. Log a support ticket and it spews out AI shit that I have already tried or doesn't help.

Some victory. PC sales have been plummeting in favour of mobile and now component prices. Console space is now done with any semblance of competition - Sony is a monopoly and will soon start behaving as such. And xbox's portfolio of many many IPs will go straight to the bin.

That was a really interesting interview.
I liked that he did have some advice for the new Xbox boss at the end, basically "go talk to other people who have held similar positions in other games companies, like Reggie Fils-Aime. Tho he does seem pretty convinced that the new boss' job will really be to kill off Xbox in order to make more room for AI

My favorite last week was 2 dead support numbers and a third that let to AI which happily told me it has a solution that will fix the problem. The link it sent brought me to the bing search page.

I was so happy to finally talk to indian support a day later.

That makes sense. Microsoft didn't enter the console market for gamers or gaming- they entered it to beat sony. The PS2 had a linux distro you could load on it to try to sell it as a computer to circumvent luxury import taxes. If it WAS a computer, it would compete with Microsoft Windows. They were worried that a console could just sell software instead of games and be a competitor, so they threw a ton of money trying to run Sony out of business.

Microsoft never really wanted to win gaming. The war was against an enemy that wasn't really a threat. So not killing off a console wasn't really a "loss".

Ah fuck I forgot about mobile and I hate to consider it.

They can’t even make money with their AI, they only survive off the windows OEM licenses, Office 365 subs that businesses are locked into and their backend server and sql stuff. That’s enough to make them a walking dead for a long time.

Gone are the mom and pop bakeries too. :(

Damn, I can't wait to pillage and plunder the datacenters with the lads in a few months.

When I was 5 years old, I used to go to a bakery. And it was locally owned.

I'd go in, and I'd buy a brownie. And I'd do my moms shopping. Just lite stuff. Gallon of milk. Carton of cigerettes. Loaf of bread. Sometimes pancake mix. Then I'd buy a brownie from the bakery.

Every Saturday morning.

This went on for years. Until one day, I came in, clearly something wrong. I bought all my moms groceries. I'm 15 by this point. But I didn't get my brownie. And so when Abeer (shop owners name) put my brownie on the counter, I said no. She could already tell something was wrong before the brownie rejection. But now she had to ask. I said "I don't want a brownie today".

She said "I'll give you one. It's ok if you don't pay this week."

I said "No. It's not about money. I don't want a brownie."

She asked "Whats wrong?"

I said "Papa died..." and I burst into tears. Papa was my grandfather. He had died the night before. I just wanted to get in, and get out. Without talking really. But when she heard Papa died, she rushed around the counter and hugged me.

Here's a woman who I'd grown up with. Every weekend talking for 30-60 minutes. She was the shopkeep, yes, but she was also a close family friend.

I was in this trance/haze of doing what I need to do, because I need to, but my mind was elsewhere. I was just trying to do my moms shopping, and get home in 5 minutes so I could curl back up in bed. Not to sleep, but just to try not to remember that I exist.

So when she ran around the counter to hug me, I didn't even know what was happening. I thought she was still behind the counter, and now suddenly she's hugging me.

I'm 42 now, but I cannot imagine kids today being able to understand the core concept of old school communities. They've been ripped out and replaced by walmart and other heartless souless corporations.

Can you imagine a 6 year old leaving his house, walking 10 minutes, entering walmart, and spending 30 minutes talking to the workers, telling them about the week at school? Showing her your TMNT toys you got for your birthday? Telling them various things about your life?

I cannot imagine that, but that was how the whole neighborhood was growing up. Every store a small community shop. Every adult knew every kid. Every kid knew every kid.

One time I was walking home and it started raining. So I just went onto the doorstep of the first house I saw that I knew a kid lived at. I'm just standing on the porch, waiting for it to stop raining. Suddenly Andys mom opens the door. She says "Andys not here right now. He's over at James house."

I said "Oh, ok. I'm just using the porch as shelter until it clears."

And thats when Andys mom drove me home. Thats just how it was. A whole community looking out for the whole community.

Now anytime I go back to my old neighborhood, I don't recognize it. C-Town pizza is gone. Obviously the video rental stores are gone. One time I even went and knocked on the houses of the kids I knew. Wondering if anyone I used to know inherited their parents old houses. Nope. I had a woman yell at me for disturbing her time. Wasn't anyone I used to know.

But just looking around, I could tell the street layout may be the same, but this wasn't a community. This was an isolated set of houses.

And now I'm sad. Because I miss those days. I miss the idea of everyone caring about everyone. I miss the wholesome nature of a new family moving in, and everyone just bombarding them with welcoming arms. I miss the idea of just going to my friends house, and walking in, Kramer style (minus the racism).

Now life is just cold and isolated.

That was a powerful story. Man, you said it all. Thank you for sharing that. :)

It's been for a few years now.

Yeah. That old lady spending £3000 a month on gems for "Royal Candy Blaster Treasure Blitz Origins" is the gaming industry now. :(

No, many of them will go to PCs or Sony over giving up

If you are ever on a road trip and go by a Wawa gas station, stop and get their soft pretzels. buy as many as you can and freeze whatever you don’t eat for later.

The german grocery store Lidl also has decent soft pretzels.

yeah at the very least it signaled their intentions.

I was thinking the same thing. We've known about it for years.

They're still scamming the shit out of businesses with their corporate software. Oh and they have Azure which I'm guessing makes money.

What can I say but... at least their hardware was on average a little more functional than Sony's.

Ain't that quiet.

There are already a bunch of documented but umimplemented functions in a few Xbox related API, like GameInput.

You mean Tencent mobile games

Fuck. This is the beauty and compassion we have lost.

Its got to be deliberate. They've had so many chances and fucked it, and they've had so many successes that they've just cancelled or discontinued for seemingly no reason.

didn't the new exec come from their AI division?

So, also AI?

My feeling on Xbox since Xbox One days has been pretty much "this is an awesome platform, you're sitting on a gold mine Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing?"

The last bit of brilliance they did utilise properly was GamePass, and of course they cocked that up by getting greedy.

Last few years have been extremely rough. The only lucky thing about this is that instead of full Xbox exclusivity Microsoft was pushing Xbox/Windows cross functionality. ...Yeah, I've been pivoting to PC, but Steam/GOG instead.

Isn't it ironic? The only Microsoft product that makes money consistently is based on Linux.

It's insane how Microsoft is handling Xbox:

• They have their own console and Windows
• They bought everything they could and now own most of the biggest gaming franchises outside of Nintendo: Activision-Blizzard. Minecraft. Halo. Call of Duty. Warcraft. Starcraft. Diablo. Candy Crush. Elder Scrolls. Fallout. id software. Bethesda.

They have everything in place and are still getting slapped around by Valve and Sony and are now talking about shutting down everything?

Meanwhile, their biggest competitor is either Linux or UNIX. That is, if you accept that macOS "is UNIX." It's been UNIX certified for a couple years now, but it's UNIX in name only. While Steve Jobs' NeXTStep was based on UNIX, NeXTStep was also vapourware. Still, it became OS X which became the macOS we know and love (or hate) today. But the truth is, it's UNIX 3 certified, which is a decades-old certification, and it only just barely makes that. So it's a thing Mac users brag about. "A UNIX system! I know this!" Jurassic Park meme. And then of course there's Linux. And of course Windows has the Linux subsystem. Still, non-*nix is going the way of the dodo, just like Win9x did when Microsoft realised WinNT was the future. First with the tranwreck that was WinME, but much more importantly with WinXP. And NT was good, but its time is up (or will be soon).

They thoroughly shit the bed, it's an astonishing display of incompetence.

As a long time IT guy... this is how Microsoft does everything