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When you set an impossible goal (30% yoy profit margin for the gaming division), you know that you are killing off that division, just, slowly.
Satya just really wants an AI girlfriend that is also in everyone’s homes simultaneously, that he can use to spy on everyone for the NSA.
Not that it directly matters, but I did literally work for MSFT during the 360 3RR / Windows 8 era.
I kinda know at least a little about the uh, corporate culture.
I think they are sunsetting whole company.
That’s what their actions felt like for decades yet somehow they’ve always kept chugging along.
Nah, shifting heavily toward being B2B.
I can only hope.
Wtf I just came up with the same comment without reading yours first.
So yeah, I agree. They must have done the calculation that it’s easiest to just not exist and lay everyone off.
You mean Microsoft? I hope but I doubt it, they have a lot of companies locked in their products
I love how nobody here is getting me actual picture. They’re not going to sell Xbox to people anymore. What’s going to happen is they’re going to turn to a subscriber model where you have to log into a data center that they control and use your browser to play video games. Paying a monthly subscription for the privilege of playing their exclusive games. In fact I will bet money that the first product that will be introduced with this feature is going to be the highly anticipated upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.
Mark my words. Either at the time of release or shortly thereafter they’re going to introduce the ability to subscribe to play GTA 6 in your browser on a remote gaming system. And then they’re going to phase out physical Xbox systems over the next couple of years.
This has been tried before and never worked well. What makes you think its going to work any better now?
I even have a free controller google gave me when they tried it.
It doesn’t need to work well.
It needs to sound like it will make more money for MSFT’s board.
You’re approaching this from the angle of ‘is this a sensible and sustsinable long term business strategy.’
Nobody cares!
They care about LINE GO UP BIG FAST NOW!
Oh man, those stadia controllers. Not the stupidest $99 I’ve ever spent, but still pretty dumb.
The only thing that makes me think it might work this time is that for some reason Microsoft has this magical ability to take a bad idea, make the shittiest possible iteration of it and have it mysteriously become the most widely-adopted standard against all logic.
Attitudes like that are not how we got a trillion dollars in spare data center infrastructure to find a use for!
Those consumers will be happy owning nothing THIS time!!
Why the LLM-driven scarcity in computing parts of course, and a little bit of cartel behavior when Nintendo and Sony inevitably announce the same thing next year.
The PS5 version of GTA6 is going to sell pretty well then
To play games coded by a shitty AI, full of bugs and as many microtransactions as possible …
Is the game buggy? Worry not! Microsoft™ Copilot 365™ powered by Azure™ will analyze your gameplay in realtime, detect when a bug occurs, and redirect you to an AI generated troubleshooting page.
My cloud computing teacher says the future of personal computing is just monitors connected to the cloud. Why couldn’t I have been born in the 70s?
The old “we don’t want to put any effort into creating anything good, we just want to milk this for cash until we can’t anymore.”
May as well. Not like anyone still uses it. They’ve done a bang on job of running everyone off
Not surprising aren’t they sundowning their whole company?
Look some people may say Xbox has confusing naming scheme, but it’s very simple, number just goes up:
First one is Xbox one. Noone in Microsoft is dumb enough to call “one” console that isn’t first of the series. Then Xbox X (because X is Roman 10) then the Xbox 360.
Very easy
Xbox S One S Xbox:
Sexbox.
…Did I get it right?
Announcing the Xbox One 2 SL XLS SE Pro, which is the basic version, and the Pro version, the Xbox Two 1 SE SL XS SLB Enterprise, both of which are vibe-coded Windows apps that stream Gamepass games without installing anything but take up 100GB of hard drive and still run your GPU at 100% somehow. The latter costs twice as much and you get a different Minecraft cape with it. They update on a completely separate schedule to the rest of Windows, but if you run either one and the updates aren’t in sync it deletes your Documents folder.
I went to walmart to look for a new xbox controller for my xbox one x and they had maybe 12 games for the Xbox series X and NONE of them were anything i would ever want to purchase. Also the series X is a trash piece of equipment that has constant overheating issues, you cannot replace the hard drive if it dies, and it looks absolutely horrible design wise. They also had zero consoles in stock, while Best buy had about 12 open box Series X that people had returned for one reason or another at the outlet store.
So looks like even retailers are giving up on it.
The xbox one x was the last good console xbox made and even it has a ton of heat related issues with the HDMI circuit.
Xbox just cannot make a high quality gaming system, they just can’t. It’s been 2 decades and they still can’t get 90% of their consoles to last more than a year or 2.
xbox one x was the last good console xbox made
Was it good? The Xbox 360 outsold it (by a lot), but even that was mostly luck because Sony notoriously fucked up the PS3 launch (and in the end, PS3 sold more anyways lmao). It also had the red ring of death issue.
The Xbox One was when they started the hardcore ramp up of enshittification which never ended even after continually losing in every way to the competition.
The OG Xbox worked well, and at least managed to outsell the GameCube (though not by a lot).
I had to go back and read your post twice because I was getting Xbox One X and Xbox Series X confused with eachother. I even know there is a difference, but holy god are those names bad. It’s still confusing even when you know to look for it. I have no clue who decided that was a good idea. Then again, I look at their recent naming schemes and I guess I should just be happy they didn’t fuck up the Xbox branding even harder.
Some products from just this one article. (Note: Microsoft 365 Copilot App, and probably others, aren’t even in the article.) Can you tell me the difference?
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
- Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Microsoft Copilot
- Microsoft Security Copilot
- GitHub Copilot
- Microsoft Copilot Studio
Don’t forget how there are like at least 4 simultaneous versions of Teams, at any given point in time.
I guess they’re going to go all-in on AI despite only 3.3% of MS365 subscribers paying for Copilot. Stonks?
The sunk cost fallacy is a bitch
They’re going to go all-in on paid streaming gaming services, like every major company for the next thousand years.
You will own nothing and be happy.
I love how corporations work.
"Hey, we completely fucked this up. We mishandled it, made decisions our customers hate, and now we’re scrapping it because we might lose money.
“Could we fix it? Sure. But that would mean changing the business model that made us money 20 years ago, and that’s terrifying. There’s a risk we might lose money.”
“And sure, the board won’t lose a dime personally. But the stockholders, basically meerkats who scatter at the first loud noise might panic. And we can’t have that. We might lose money.”
It’s insane how Microsoft is handling Xbox:
- They have their own console and Windows
- They bought everything they could and now own most of the biggest gaming franchises outside of Nintendo: Activision-Blizzard. Minecraft. Halo. Call of Duty. Warcraft. Starcraft. Diablo. Candy Crush. Elder Scrolls. Fallout. id software. Bethesda.
They have everything in place and are still getting slapped around by Valve and Sony and are now talking about shutting down everything?
More than likely they’ll just sunset Xbox the platform and rent you the ability to play games on the cloud using your phone, smart TV or computer. And all those franchises will be rentable first, then maybe buyable some day later.
Among other things they have huge data centers that are going to be unused come AI collapse - they just need to figure out how to run games on those GPUs, as they’re very very different from gaming GPUs.
As a long time IT guy… this is how Microsoft does everything
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀.meme
They thoroughly shit the bed, it’s an astonishing display of incompetence.
My feeling on Xbox since Xbox One days has been pretty much “this is an awesome platform, you’re sitting on a gold mine Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing?”
The last bit of brilliance they did utilise properly was GamePass, and of course they cocked that up by getting greedy.
Last few years have been extremely rough. The only lucky thing about this is that instead of full Xbox exclusivity Microsoft was pushing Xbox/Windows cross functionality. …Yeah, I’ve been pivoting to PC, but Steam/GOG instead.
The Xbone is what made me go PC full time.
Been a Xbox gamer since the original Xbox with Halo CE. LAN parties galore. Halo 2 and the beginning of Xbox Live was amazing. Bought a X360 at launch, got Gears and Crackdown for the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. Halo 3 was peak.
And then Xbone announced. Always online. Kinect required. “Sports” “Live TV”. Yeah, not falling for that. “Can’t just flip a switch”.
Yeah I cancelled my Xbox Live sub and built a PC. 2500K with a 550ti. Haven’t looked back since. All of my friends in our group did the same, but some bought a PS4 as well for the SP games.
Microsoft just doesn’t care. They have enough money to not care. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time for Xbox and I’d be genuinely surprised if they release another console and I’d be even more surprised if anyone actually buys it. It’s a dead ecosystem.
It’s been a sad thing to watch. I was the biggest Xbox fan in my circles in the 360 & One days. But by the time Series X came out, I was so disappointed in their games that I still don’t own it. Microsoft bought so many companies that I thought would bring games. Yet, most of them aren’t producing anything.
Nintendo isn’t doing much better. I was a Nintendo stan for most my youth but now they’re the leaders in stagnant games and dark patterns. You just can’t trust corporations not to backstab you anymore. Indie and opensource only for me here on.
I think MS has been surprised and confused by the success of Xbox ever since the very first one came out. It kinda stuck, and the upper management probably never really had a good idea what to do with it, as it just never really worked with them being oriented on business offerings. Remember Ballmer going wild during Xbox One reveal? Yeah. I think during this gen and previous more and more of the business people came into Xbox, and thus the meandering of the brand. They have no clue what gamers want, they’re penny pinchers and pencil pushers.
Enshittifying
After letting go of Tango disregarding their massive success, that part is pretty obvious.
This is for the best. As someone who is forced to work with a lot of Microsoft infrastructure let me tell you things have never been this broken before. They keep doubling down on AI and it simply doesn’t work.
didn’t the new exec come from their AI division?
depends on what you mean with ‘AI’, like builder.ai
Is this how they put her out to pasture? “Your AI division has been such shit that we’ll put you in charge of a division we plan to close…”
Despite the division they’re closing making way more money (aka > $0) than the one she was moved from
I feel you brother. It’s bad. They are pushing AI features at the speed of light but forgetting that other things need attention too. Log a support ticket and it spews out AI shit that I have already tried or doesn’t help.
My favorite last week was 2 dead support numbers and a third that let to AI which happily told me it has a solution that will fix the problem. The link it sent brought me to the bing search page.
I was so happy to finally talk to indian support a day later.
I will slog through so many menus and weird support numbers to talk to a real person.
There are already a bunch of documented but umimplemented functions in a few Xbox related API, like GameInput.
Microsoft is quietly sunsetting everything they cant make money on with AI.
I’m so happy that in the recent years Linux made leaps and bounds in terms of usability so now we have an alternative that actually works well, especially since Microsoft just stopped caring about desktop Windows users.
So, everything?
It feels that way. Every ongoing product MS has feels decrepit and ready to collapse.
They’re still scamming the shit out of businesses with their corporate software. Oh and they have Azure which I’m guessing makes money.
Isn’t it ironic? The only Microsoft product that makes money consistently is based on Linux.
Meanwhile, their biggest competitor is either Linux or UNIX. That is, if you accept that macOS “is UNIX.” It’s been UNIX certified for a couple years now, but it’s UNIX in name only. While Steve Jobs’ NeXTStep was based on UNIX, NeXTStep was also vapourware. Still, it became OS X which became the macOS we know and love (or hate) today. But the truth is, it’s UNIX 3 certified, which is a decades-old certification, and it only just barely makes that. So it’s a thing Mac users brag about. “A UNIX system! I know this!” Jurassic Park meme. And then of course there’s Linux. And of course Windows has the Linux subsystem. Still, non-*nix is going the way of the dodo, just like Win9x did when Microsoft realised WinNT was the future. First with the tranwreck that was WinME, but much more importantly with WinXP. And NT was good, but its time is up (or will be soon).
Azure is by far their biggest money maker if I recall
They can’t even make money with their AI, they only survive off the windows OEM licenses, Office 365 subs that businesses are locked into and their backend server and sql stuff. That’s enough to make them a walking dead for a long time.
And eventually companies will hopefully start cancelling those subscriptions to move to Open Office or Libre Office.
France is already starting that push by having government departments transition first, and are projected to save millions of euros in licensing fees each year. Once you get a critical mass of users on libre software, it’ll hopefully spread on its own
So, also AI?
Ain’t that quiet.
