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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Because we don’t have any fucking money
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 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.
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.
“with foresight”
My brother in christ, they put an “AI” shithead in charge. They practically by definition cannot have foresight.
Haha, yes. But they could. They just won’t.
They are already tending towards “Everything is an Xbox”.
Now that you will own nothing because of AI. This is fantastic for them