I would leave a flaming wreck too.

Considering how the person replacing Spencer has been known from leading Microsoft's AI division and isn't much of a gamer, this doesn't make Xbox's future rosy. Dwindling sales, large layoffs and RAM prices skyrocketing... I highly doubt they can build a competitive console.

After Mattrick, they probably shouldn't have promoted internally from the executive class that went along with the pivot of internal studios to kinect and home theater media center. They needed leadership that knew how to deliver quality games on time. Saw Sony hit its stride mid-PS3 era with the advent of the AAA narrative action adventure game and could never adjust to that. I know American company, but maybe they should have looked to Sega, Capcom, Koei Tecmo to lead Xbox game studios and someone else to lead hardware and services. Xbox was at its best when it was paying for timed exclusives in the 360 era from third parties and funding 2nd party exclusives. Their internal studio production has been weak for like 20 years. Halo, Gears, Forza Motorsport, Fable has fallen to all of them in the doldrums and Forza Horizon being their only high tier Xbox associated IP now. I'd take someone from Square Enix today to lead Xbox studios today. The last decade they've churned out games even though mostly not AAA, they're mostly solid games and satisfy a lot of niches like Dragon Quest Monsters. Square Enix games are oddly experimental and creative for such a large publisher. Something Xbox sorely lacks. Master Chief is barely surviving as a console mascot and that's practically all they have at this point. Conker and Banjo are irrelevant with how they've handled those IPs

A simultaneous retirement/resignation says to me that the two of them were asked to do something very stupid or very unethical. And they've stomached a lot of unethical lately.

I wonder how much of this is the big bet that they placed on buying up Activision Blizzard (plus other studios) and not being able to show enough growth on Gamepass?

And now of course, with skyrocketing hardware costs, and the ripple effects of tariffs before that, even putting MS’s preoccupation with cloud services and AI to one side, the console business probably isn’t the money spinner it once was.

I’d be surprised if Xbox is a thing in 5 years after this news. The way things are right now Microsoft can’t make an Xbox console that will succeed by any metric. Maybe it’ll stick around as software.

Phil had to salvage the brand after the fucking disaster that was Xbox One and I don’t think he was terrible but it clearly wasn’t working out.

Replacing him with the head of Core AI is a fucking joke though.

With the cost of hardware skyrocketing and Sony closing studios gaming is in a really dark place right now.

Hey don't discount them that much, they also can't make games either. They're going for full on business-only approach, consumers are not a priority for them at all anymore.

If ram goes up for everyone, Microsoft is no worse placed. There will be less sales overall, but they could take a larger piece of that pie of they were good. They won't.

One thing that might go in their favour is pc gaming. If ram and video cards get super crazy for long enough, people might have a single PC and gaming console. The steam deck should be well placed to take advantage. Microsoft could be too, with foresight.

It's not all bad. AI can make some great creative games with lots of soul. There will be hundreds.

This could be good for gaming if it's the death knell of subscription 'ownership'.

You can sell consoles with advertisement and marketing. The product is a secondary concern.

And with AI + bunch of privately owned mass media, you can saturate the brains of the next generation of gamers with endless targeted ads.

Fully expect Discord to begin vomiting ad spam into random chat streams like Reddit channels are getting bombarded with Crypto Casino promotions.

I wonder if this is a huge demotion for the AI guy. AI teams in Microsoft are "good" right now, I wonder if he fucked up in some way and they put him on xbox.

I was going to say "good riddance", but considering that his replacement is a former AI exec... Lol.

To be fair, I don't envy anyone who is put in charge of the mess that is Xbox right now.

Yeah I don’t know. The knee jerk reaction Is “hey make Xbox have more AI”. She at least has the sense to have her first press release say “we’ll have no AI slop in our games” but we’ll see if that lasts.

CoD has been caught using AI art already.

PlayStation outlives yet another competitor.

Phil was probably the last thing keep Xbox from fully imploding. You could tell he was an actual gamer that cared about the Xbox as a games console and not whatever Frankenstein they are going to turn it into.

It’s sad but Xbox had a really good run. Xbox won’t exist beyond the next console generation, it may not even make it that far before it just becomes gamepass.

So....is Xbox done?

This has to be sarcasm.

This ain't it!

Chief

Please add /s if you’re being sarcastic because otherwise you just look like a fool.

A silver lining is that the NVIDIA/OpenAI deal was cut by ~70% this week, so hopefully the reality of AI not being a panacea sets in for those who have been driving the prices up. If the planned data centers never actually get built, production will shift back and consumer pricing should adjust accordingly. The MBA class will keep trying to manipulate it artificially of course, but they'll only be able to keep the ruse this far from reality for so long.

Microslop definitely asked told him to use AI.

How sad for Obsidian Entertainment to go the same way as Black Isle Studios... but they probably will when the Xbox division completely fails.

Because we don't have any fucking money

That's an obvious joke.

It really does seem to follow the classic arc of going from marketing to consumers to B2B but like, you can't sell games B2B can you? It's so direct to consumer

Makes sense, Xbox is barely a thing anymore

Good. Phil Spencer may have been a better lead for Xbox during the OG and 360 years, but the XB1 was a joke and the Series X, while pretty good, could have been better. And doubling the price of GamePass Ultimate made it a non-starter for a lot of people. Half the price of a game every month and I don't get to keep any of them? Huh? At $15 it was a no-brainer; at $30, it's a non-starter. And they sold the Series S on GamePass.

Sarah Bond always annoyed me. Seemed like she was always badly trying to put out a fire. I don't know where she was before, I'm sure she earned her spot somehow, but she always seemed like the "bad cop" in most situations.

As for PlayStation, they're run by bankers and lawyers, not gamers. I liked the first two PlayStations. PS3 was definitely better than XB1 (even though XB1's contemporary was the PS4... PS3 was still better). I haven't had a PlayStation since PS3, but I don't like how Sony does business. That said, they're Japanese, and they make/own a lot of the anime and music I listen to (I listen to a lot of Japanese music). But, that's like saying Samsung phones are good because their refrigerators are. It's a fallacy at best, but it's mostly bullshit. PlayStation is very much its own thing at Sony. And I don't agree with most of their decisions.

Steam looks like the least crappy option right now, with the Switch 2 being fully last-generation and costing like $500... and the games being $80 each... Screw that. (Switch 1 is still cool for what it is, the 2.5D Zelda games, and Animal Crossing. If you're into cosy/chill games.) I kinda want a Steam Machine but I won't pay $1000 for one. I think people thinking it will be $500-600 are huffing some serious hopium. $700 feels like a compromise between what gamers want it to be ($500) and what it probably will be ($1000). They want Valve to take a loss on each unit because they kiss up to Valve on social media, but Valve has already said they are not going to sell it at a loss. So all I'm saying is... get ready for a four-digit price tag. Especially if it's gonna run modern games at good framerates and resolutions. The one thing I can say for the "it'll be $500" guys is, the M4 Mac mini is $500 and that can run Cyberpunk. And it's a whole Mac, so you know it's a good computer. Thing is, most game devs aren't friendly to people who actually put their money where their mouth is and actually kick Microslop to the curb. They'll support Linux hoping you'll just go back to Windows on the same machine, but you buy a computer that (AFAIK, until Windows for ARM comes out) can't run Windows... then it's FU in particular. (And honestly, no one really buys a Mac for gaming. They're just cool computers that aren't PCs.)

I was honestly surprised when we got the Series. I was pretty convinced that they were done with consoles after the One X|S and that Xbox would become more of a Steam competitor as a brand. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Series ended up being the last console.

Another?

They are already tending towards "Everything is an Xbox".

Now that you will own nothing because of AI. This is fantastic for them

His name was Ozymandias, King of Kings.

Sega, I guess?

SEGA? A bit ancient history by now I guess

The term „AI art“ irks me, IMO it tries to legitimize the virtual theft that it’s based on by implying there‘s a creative, artistic process behind it. It‘s gotta be a lobbied term.

My guess?

Former AI guy's job is to figure out how to make AI make video games, and in the meantime, figure out how to cram AI data scraping into absolutely every possible element of ... whatever Xbox Live is called now.

The first will almost certainly fail, the second is much easier and will make the division more profitable untill it gets axxed after the first thing totally fails.

EDIT:

Erp, its AI gal, not AI guy.

Asha Sharma.

But... her recent LinkedIn history outside of MSFT is:

Board Member of Home Depot (ongoing)

Board Member of Coupang (ongoing)

(A Fortune 200 tech platform and South Korea's largest e commerce company)

COO of Instacart (2021-2024)

Headed up, among other things, data science.

She was also apparently a VP at Meta/Facebook, before that.

Oh hey, I've done data analytics, I've done data science!

I've even also done lower level grunt work at MSFT!

Yeah I am 100% certain of the second part of my guess now.

Less certain about the first part, as she has literally no background with game development, as far as I can tell.

IMO, she is absolutely going to be put in charge of squeezing every last possible drop out of Xbox, which MSFT will most likely just transition to being basically a publisher only/primarily, given how many big IPs they own...

...and they'll probably switch over to a new person after there's basically nothing left to squeeze, after they've essentially functionally randomly fired at least 50% of the people working for the studios they now own, and essentially randomly reorganized the remainder of those people into different or new studios, see Ubisoft.

"Best" case scenario, after the AI bubble pops, she manages to figure out some kind of partner ship with either Nvidia or some remaining firm that has a bunch of AI datacenter GPUs, and then we get Xbox's attempt at Google Stadia.

I'll not sure Spencer had been doing a great job, but this feels incredibly abrupt and makes me wonder if Xbox's next generation hardware plans are cancelled in favor of a software and AI approach. The new CEO being an AI suit makes me think they want to take shit it a very different direction.

If Spencer couldn't keep the Xbox machine alive, an outsider who's not a gamer is gonna ruin it more so than it is

Microslop is making a number of baffling choices that were influenced by huffing the farts of Satya and other AI fools. Asha Sharma is in no way capable of running Xbox anywhere but into the ground (not like she'll have to do much, given the state of Xbox). Phil Spencer retiring from Microslop is probably a move he made knowing they are going to continue their downward spiral. Sarah Bond resigning from her position is a curious one. I wonder if Microslop execs talked future plans for Xbox with her, and felt so stunned by their incompetence, Sarah decided to abandon the Xbox division. There are other factors likely involved, but, I doubt we'll be privy to those details just yet. When the postmortem of Xbox is released...The people involved might talk about, at least I hope so.

As I don't feel Xbox as a console has a future, my current plan is to abandon Xbox as a platform. It will take time because right now buying an upgraded Gaming PC will be difficult, due to the insanity of hardware prices. For now, I'll have to simply save my money and bide my time.

What the fuck is "overmuch"?

Crazy how Microsoft spent the GDP of a decent sized country on acquiring game developers to bolster Xbox, then gave that strategy about 25 months to actually work before deciding "nevermind, pivot to AI then sell it for parts."

I edited that to: "not like she'll have to do much, given the state of Xbox". I was typing faster than my brain could think...It's been a day.

Microsoft needs to have a sit down with Sega on how to become a decent 3rd party developer.

You’d hope, but it’s 2026 and there are some people who fucking date AIs. And fuck them.

Soooooo yeahhhhh, clarification would be appreciated.

XBox will still get development as long as Microsoft wants gaming on PC on a way it can somewhat control. Part of the reason why the XBox got made was because Microsoft already developed the software required to make a console.

Haha gotcha. I actually searched it up and overmuch is a word. Hadn't heard that one before.

Yeah, 'overmuch' is a very useful word, great for shortening sentences! As an avid reader, I do see plenty of words...Rarely, do I use them because following KISS is for the best!

Yeah, I’m glad I’m not alone in having that vibe about Phil.

@hitmyspot@aussie.zone do you date ais?