Link: https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xboxs-leadership-shift-proves-it-the-gamer-era-is-over-ai-runs-the-show-now

So, who exactly is she? Well, externally, she’s the former VP of Product and Engineering at Meta, CEO of Instacart, and current board member for Coupang and Home Depot. She only recently came to Microsoft in 2024 as the President of CoreAI. Don’t worry, if you’re double-checking to see if any of that is related to gaming in some sort of way, let me save you the trouble; it’s not.

Anyone who thinks Xbox is still going to be worth anything is a fool. They overspent on gaming studios, didn't produce anything of value, gamepass value went down, and now everyone hates them for the constant enshittification. Even stepping back from "This is lemmy and we all hate microsoft" they have done some horrible business moves with Xbox. I don't know anyone who is positive about the brand. They have ran it firmly into the ground.

I think if anything this proves the Gamer Era has just begun: Free of corporatocracy.

But as always they will blame “market conditions” and “customers changing tastes”. Instead of “we pointed a fuckload of MBAs that only care about monetizing in the short term and milking every penny we can short term even though it’s killing all long term prospects of the product and driving away customers in droves”

They've already announced that the new Xbox is made by ASUS so I think that confirms my long held suspicion that they're transitioning to an XBOX store for PCs, much like the XBOX Ally

I think that gamers will fight tooth and nail to keep the yoke on.

They wont abandon the brand but it will be much more focused monetization and exploration of existing gamers. Pushing for more subscriptions, more live servcies, pushing for their streaming services, and using gamers to train their AI.

Given their push for copilot gaming, wouldn't surprise me if they use the last two to make some kind of claim they're use AI to reduce latency by having AI "predict" your moves making streaming better.

I really think that part of what is changing is that the hardware people run games on is becoming less and less differentiated in both power class and capability. And the hardware that does bring a large performance gap is very expensive.

the fact that they picked a woman of color to be the new lead of xbox lmao. least obvious glass cliff

So Sony said something similar about milking it's current customer base more by charging more for services/software and not really offering anything new in return. Console gaming maybe dead or at least the next generation will most likely be the last.

I don't see consoles surviving for much long with so many things working against them like AI, cloud services, mobile offerings, PC alternatives, and increasing hardware costs.

Also if AI can predict what I'm going to do and do it for me then what if that's not what I was going to do. It would suck the joy out of actually doing the things. Single player games probably don't matter as much but feel like it would ruin PVP like overly aggressive aim assist.

Microsoft can just go on doubling and tripling down on bad decisions indefinitely and make it everyone elses' problem because they have so much money that it barely matters if they fail.

I've got 2,000 steam games I haven't played yet. The era of the gamer has a big enough buffer to not end for years.

At some point you have to be impressed by Microsoft's dedication to ruining their own products

To be fair, Sarah Bond was in a similar position and is a woman of color, too.

Screw all the consoles. They deserve extinction for scamming everyone for years by requiring monthly subscriptions to play online.

Literally like selling someone a subscription to drive your car out of town.

Literally like selling someone a subscription to drive your car out of town.

We do have that. It’s the gas tax we pay to the government.

Consoles will be the last to go because they’re the only gaming hardware sold as loss leaders. The days where you could “Build a better PC for the same price” are long, long gone. When the consoles go, gaming as a mainstream industry goes wirh them.

You have that alternative already so when you‘re in that boat nothing really changed. But yes indie games will see the largest growth in the game industry this year for sure. Mega corps can‘t help but shooting themselves in the foot in blind greed.

Soulless corps and political parties love to put women and especially women of color in positions of power when things go sour. They don‘t expect her to be there for long. She‘s essentially a scapegoat hire.

And the fact that indie studios continue to put out bangers. It’s just aaa corpotrash gaming that is ending.

I dont think the analogy works. Gas taxes are universal in the U.S. for road fuel, they also fund infrastructure, not stock holders and CEOs.

A tax is not an arbitrary subscription fee, it's an ongoing expensive.

In order for your analogy to work, the fee would need to be created out of no where for no reason other than self enrichment; and there would need to be a viable alternative that provides practically the exact same benefit with no fee. The fee would also need to expire and require renwal despite not using the product, which isn't the case for gas.

I remember the Halo x Bonobo incident very clearly, the higher ups of that company are incredibly socially incompetent at best

The health of video games shouldn't be measured by what Microsoft does. That's like measuring the economy based on how a bunch of big companies are doing.

It's inaccurate as hell and doesn't actually take into consideration the small folks who make up the majority.

Exactly. I don't mind paying 30 euros for Mewgenics, for example.

Interesting concept

There wasn't ever a time you could build a better or even comparable PC for the same cost as consoles in modern gaming history. It's always been something with a higher entry cost and the cost benefit coming over time with cheaper games and no mandatory subscription.

Yet PC gaming is now the "mainstream", with it being the biggest platform globally.

Winning every year since the launch of the ps1.

Yeah, the situation is largely the same as when everyone was convinced xbow wouod quit making consoles (or worse with hardware prices now).

Cant see how this can go well.

I'm just going to stop looking at articles with remotely sensational headlines.

It works pretty well. The console network fees fund infrastructure, the employees that run the infrastructure, etc. neither the gas tax nor the console network fees are arbitrary. As for the “required renewal despite not using it” thing we just have other things for that in the form of vehicle registration.

Playstation: we have one game

FTFY

The generation has been hell

Don't you love it when you are working for a big company, and they announce that the new CEO is from Coke or Pillsbury or Ford or some other industry that has nothing in common with yours, but somehow just doing the same job as the last know-nothing that they fired, using the same current popular experimental business strategies, is going to be better this time?

And then they pay them millions to fuck it all up, while they pay you a pittance to try to keep it together, as they fuck it up.

They're like the Democrats of the Gaming Universe, always snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

As an ex-record industry executive, I know what it's like to be part of an industry that decides to just shoot itself in the head.

At my last company they got rid of the CEO because of some thing she was doing. They have a big meeting to tell us and introduce the guy that's replacing her.. The guy who got hired a year ago, spent who knows how much on some "fleet management" software. Software that we never used because we all objected to installing the app on our personal phones that wanted to track our location and have all sorts of other crazy permissions. Dude just failed up to CEO

You get to watch somebody make more money than youll make in your entire life to fuck up to the point where you lose your job

Thank the good Greek lords for indie games.

You could never really build a better PC for the same price, consoles were always $300 to $400 cheaper than the equivalent PC at launch by design. Pre gen4 consoles really had to compete with Arcades and gen4 to gen 6 really only had to compete with each other. Gen 6 and after now have strong competition from PC and mobile.

PC suffered from a lack of eco system, cost, and complexity. Consoles were sold at a loss at launch because the software was tied to the proprietary hardware and they could make their money back by offering exclusive games and pay to play online.

Now consoles are just under powered custom PCs and Steam/GOG have built eco systems for PC to make PC gaming more friendly and now Steam is building hardware to make PC gaming more affordable. Plus with cloud gaming everyone can stream just about any game no matter what hardware they have.

Nintendo will probably hang on the longest with their unique hardware and IPs that will never ever get ported to another system, at least not until Nintendo no longer builds their own hardware.

AI and Cloud gaming will probably be the biggest thing to revolutionize the gaming industry and probably the most destructive since Atari over saturated the market. At least in the short term.

I remember being very annoyed, for years, that Microsoft stoped releasing their flagship gaming franchise, Halo, for their most popular platform: Windows. For years, only Halo and Halo 2 were released for PC, and Halo 2 was almost unplayable due to Microsoft's massive cockup with Games for Windows Live. It was clear they didn't give a shit about their customers as they tried to force them to re-buy hardware and pay a monthly fee, while simultaneously sabotaging gaming on the PC.

It wasn't until just a few years ago where Microsoft released their most popular franchise for their most popular platform. I'm still salty about that.

God damn am I happier now though. I don't have an xbox or a Windows computer, I'm not beholden to their decades of compounding bad decisions.

I mean they made a console for the same reason as everyone else: They wanted a dedicated DRM machine. One that they can control from bottom to top.

XSlop era.

More wishcasting gigacope from window's personal diary. The windows gaming era may be over, that's the kernel of truth.

Thankfully, it's not, not in any meaningful way. The source is a big indicator of how much you should trust the assertion being made.

Actual broad metrics show that gaming in general is currently the most profitable entertainment industry, and it's not even close. So that's good, MS is just assmad that they've very efficiently begun removing themselves from that industry at this point.

Im surprised they gave up so easily. Like they have huge pockets and this is one of their signature products. It had 1 bad generation and they were just like well i guess we're cooked. There is so much to "innovate" on. They could have copied steams approach and had given their console a desktop mode that runs a stripped down but still fully functional version of windows. They could have made a console with good hardware.

Oh well at the end of the day a loss for Microsoft is a win for everyone else. They wont be missed by me.

To be honest Phil's just done a bad job at the helm or maybe wasn't empowered to do the things that needed to be done. Everything since the xbox360 has been weak from Microsoft, although Sony has really only held on due to some banger first party games.

Nintendo continues to understand that you need to offer something different in the console space to remain relevant. While the steam deck (and other handheld) are coming for the switch, they at least offer something unique.

“we pointed a fuckload of MBAs that only care about monetizing

If I ever end up in a position where I'm reviewing potential employees, having an MBA is going to be an automatic rejection, regardless of their other qualifications.

Imo, getting an MBA makes you worse at being a productive employee. And the people that get them don't have personalities that are conducive to being good at their jobs

For the past 15 years, the hardware costs have been subsidized by both online subscriptions and storefront cuts for digital purchases.

That being said, consoles haven't been sold at a loss for multiple generations now. They've mainly been cheaper due to economies of scale

I don’t have a single exclusive for PlayStation 5 that didn’t also come out on ps4. So idk, I’d probably say Astro Bot is PlayStation’s game