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.
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.
PlayStation: we won?
At some point you have to be impressed by Microsoft’s dedication to ruining their own products
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.
And the fact that indie studios continue to put out bangers. It’s just aaa corpotrash gaming that is ending.
Exactly. I don’t mind paying 30 euros for Mewgenics, for example.
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.
the fact that they picked a woman of color to be the new lead of xbox lmao. least obvious glass cliff
Interesting concept
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.
I remember the Halo x Bonobo incident very clearly, the higher ups of that company are incredibly socially incompetent at best
To be fair, Sarah Bond was in a similar position and is a woman of color, too.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
I think if anything this proves the Gamer Era has just begun: Free of corporatocracy.
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.
I think that gamers will fight tooth and nail to keep the yoke on.
so is microsoft just abandoning xbox like rumored?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
