We’ve almost reached the end of the 1st half of 2024, and Xbox has had more studio closures than first party game releases in the year so far.
We’ve almost reached the end of the 1st half of 2024, and Xbox has had more studio closures than first party game releases in the year so far.
Did they just want to buy the IPs? Why throw Billions at video game development, only to cut out the development part?
Microsoft has always been more than happy to make the market smaller by buying the competition and discontinuing their products shortly after. For some reason people didn’t think Xbox would do the same?
I’m not entirely sure but wasn’t this Bill Gates’s business strategy back in the 90s or so?
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish in 1998, Bill Gates stated: “One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destory [sic] Windows.”
Not just Gates, but all higher ups at Microsoft think this way. It’s kind of naive to think Xbox would be different IMHO.
Business plan? You mean capitalism? They are just participating in the system.
One could argue to get exclusivity of said IPs for their subscription service. They haven’t pulled the trigger yet, it’s possible they have aborted the plan entirely. I wonder if they even know what they’re doing.
I really hope this bites them if the industry goes less IP-centric. We’ve gotten a slow build of “From the developers of…” fan hype, and I don’t think a big “2” matters as much as it used to.
Elden Ring, Overwatch, Cyberpunk, Genshin Impact, were all technically “new franchises” but built insane followings off either good marketing or high knowledge of their studio. So now all MS can do is copy the death path of their parrot studios like 343 Industries and The Coalition, which were built to try to tentpole their old franchises made by better studios.