I can imagine them carrying on making consoles this generation but long-term Microsoft is a services company and over successive generations they have failed to recapture the lead from Sony since the 360. Ultimately, they just want to make more money and struggling in the hardware business is not an exciting place for them to be in.
I say this as a Series S owner: the writing is on the wall. I will likely not be purchasing another Microsoft console after this, though I’m not sure they’d be interested in releasing one. I want to buy and own games I can play locally on a piece of hardware, which probably means I have to return to Sony or go back to the humble PC. For anyone currently on the fence seeing this news, I don’t know why they’d consider buying into the Xbox platform and tying in all their gaming purchases.
Oh wow that means Xbox probably won’t be making consoles anymore
They’d be dumb to keep making consoles as we know them today. A much better long term business move would be to make a “cloud gaming Chromecast” a la Stadia but, if they want to retain their fan base, a disc player that mearly reads and validates your disc and then runs the game from the cloud. Thus letting Xbox fans still have access to their games. That in turn would allow them to have the base subscription have a library that changes to a great degree every month and you only get “permanent” access if you buy the games. Hell if the “buy” cost is lowered then people would by and large applaud them for it.
The hardware has almost always been sold at a loss but with how many datacenters they have now, how long they’ve been refining the game pass and the Xbox Cloud gaming service it seems like the only way to wrestle away Sony and PlayStations dominance in high end console gaming.
Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely hate the whole “you will own nothing, rent everything, and be happy” paradigm were in now and refuse it for a lot of things. But I also understand business and I’m reasonably sure the average consumer will actually love it. “Console” for like $100, the subscription say $15 at base, $25 for the full month and you get all the games you could ever play. It would be a no-brainer for any non-gamer parent. The kids will love it, no more begging for that new game, they’ll have it day one and so will all their friends. Hell parents will probably also love the blanket, one time, parental action of setting which ESRB ratings are allowed instead of having to vet it game by game while the kid screams that Johnny gets to play it. Now they can just say ‘no if the Xbox won’t let you see it and play it then there’s nothing I can do honey’ and it’s just enough deflection that it might pass.
It’s really only when you zoom out that it becomes a shitty deal. But that’s not something the majority ever cares go do.
Yeah because PlayStation Now, OnLive, Stadia, xCloud, GeForce Now & Luna were such rousing successes.
When are people going to realize that the AAA gaming crowd just isn’t interested in Cloud gaming? They have oodles of disposable income, “cost” is not a real barrier to entry for this group.
Microsoft should abandon the Xbox and offer some kind of BC program, I agree with that. But any box is as good as the next. Offer xCloud and game streaming on everything, stop making hardware, and publish games for PS5, PC, and Switch where it makes sense.
Maybe it’ll take off, maybe it won’t. But the actual console part of the business isn’t doing them any favours, they’re just PCs sold at crappy margins now.
As inclined I am to agree with you on a personal level, kids these days are trained to think games just come with MTX, and all bonus content in a game that isn’t a loot box is just paid DLC. All Microsoft has to do is just make this the easiest way to get Xbox games, keep it going long enough, and people eventually won’t know any better or even care anymore. Then they ratchet up the price to make it feel like they’re still profiting from console sales as well.
Latency is enough of a thing that even a child raised on it will recognize the benefits of running the game locally, not to mention mods and other privileges that come with having a local copy of a game.
I’m probably just getting pessimistic with age, but corporations just see dollar signs with subscriptions and reduced expenses with digital distribution. Then they will outlive you and me.
It may be objectively better for players to have physical copies of their games installed on hardware they have dominion over, but we are unlikely to be around to prove that to our great grandkids. We can’t even guarantee even our own children will care enough to try to tell theirs. I’m almost certain owning physical copies of digital content is going to be for niche hobbyists in the future.
People always talk about this being physical versus digital, but I’d say this is about DRM. Physical media decays. DRM-free games can be perfectly copied over and over again, and it comes with the bonus of not taking up space in my apartment. If a game requires a server to connect to or stream from, that’s often just a fancy form of DRM.
My 7yo was upset the other night because I’d been playing FF7R (wanted to finish before the new one hits) instead of joining him in Minecraft or Fortnite or Parkitect or whatever.
He literally thought that FF7R didn’t have an ending because I guess in his mind all games are just live service/hobby things. Even I guess the ones that are story things.
Yeah…I don’t believe it.
It’s really been whiplash inducing to go from reading about how Microsoft was going to dominate gaming because of the Activision buyout to reading about how Microsoft is going to be the next Sega and are possibly exiting the console market. And it all happened in the span of a few months.
They’ve still got to make the Xbox X Series One 360.
I heard they’re doing a 180 on the 360
“We’re listening and we hear you,” Phil Spencer wrote on X earlier this week. “We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”
If I understand corporate speech correctly, this means that XBox is essentially doomed. This is far more damning than anything that he is responding to could possibly have been saying.
Xbox. XBox is what my mom typed out 10 years ago 😂
Whenever a company addresses a something like this, like insisting a thing that is rumoured to be happening isn’t happening, it is almost certainly happening.
To be fair, the rumor isn’t that Microsoft is getting rid of consoles. The rumor is that they’re making decisions that will, in a handful of years’ time, almost certainly result of getting rid of their consoles.
So, the distinction is that they are getting rid of consoles… later? Wow, thanks. That was fair!
The distinction is that they’re making a decision that will likely result in not making consoles anymore. It’s like how governments don’t decide to increase traffic; they decide to expand freeways to more lanes, but the only thing that can come from that is that they increased traffic. They think they’re solving a problem, but they’re actually, usually, making it worse by those actions that we have a historical record for how they play out.
Haven’t there been some pretty flagrant cases where someone said “we are not doing XYZ” and then like 3 months later there was a big press announcement stating “guess what? We’re doing XYZ, and think you’re going to love it!!”?
3 months being exactly one financial quarter. They probably weren’t lying, they were committed… for that quarter. When they read the numbers next quarter, well that’s completely unrelated to today’s commitments!
Can’t decide whether you’re talking about Google shutting down Stadia or the Berlin Wall /j
Stadia
Haha, this also came to my mind :D
Sadly, this doesn’t mean anything. Executives can’t and won’t share highly confidential future plan data with non-executive employees who don’t immediately require the knowledge, because if even one of them leaks that info, it can (and in this case, certainly would) tank their stock price.
Stopping production is not a plan that requires years of dev work to do, it’s something that they can announce at any time and put into practice almost immediately, so they can and will claim (even internally) that Xbox is not going away right up to the moment they publicly announce they’re killing it.
I love Phil, but he doesn’t have the influence within MS to single-handedly save Xbox if the larger company leadership decides to kill it.
