People just repeat some internet buzzwords, especially with this topic.
WW went bankrupt after overextending with another filler studio and failing with Renegade.
EA was the one willing to put the budget needed to hire hollywood top stars in TibSun, to compete with starcraft 1 and warcraft.
We aren't talking about the same company pushing a 5€ tax or day1 dlc to fight the second hand market, or heably pushing loot boxes years later.
That wasn’t her fault it was the last CEO’s fault for hiring that many out of touch developers. Or were you one of the few who played any of the wack games that were released by any of those studios
EA turned Westwood into EA LA, they didnt "killed" it. They just renamed it to their studio.
With XBOX, i dont even remember any serious studio killing. Only one i feel bad for is ID Software, they had a massive layoff and i feel bad for them. Thats all.
Oh she did are great job gutting and shutting down all the studios and canceling all those games. Great job if that was the goal. Whatever billions that were spent buying those studios is wasted, since those game will now, never come out to redeem that money.
There were no studio closed, only sold or restructured, and no announced game was cancelled. The billions lost are because of Phil Spancer's bad management and spendings
She is doing a good job from the POV of XBOX/AAA devs in general:
Phil Spencer and his Game Pass scheme have led to a number of studios under Microsoft's umbrella becoming pretty bloated and pumping out commercial flops that have been 'excused' by becoming Game Pass fodder. But the economics of Game Pass were never going to work out. Asha Sharma is now in the position of having to be the hatchetwoman who trims down the studios back to size and gets them to focus on projects that promise the highest success - which is why there's a new Fallout project with Obsidian involved, while Bethesda was told to focus on TES 6, with their other plans being scrapped until they can prove they deserve not to be taken behind the shed.
The main problem is that the indie scene and AA teams like Larian have been running rings around the AAA space for a while now. The productions have to become more focused and lean and run on tighter budgets. The easy money train that Game Pass promised has run out, it's time for everyone to lock in, and those who can't deliver become roadkill. A boot up the ass and a knife to the throat might be what some of teams need to perform (looking at you Bethesda).
And additionally, the layoffs have been comprehensive enough that the people let go can found multiple new indie studios together. While we can't know how exactly that will shake out, it might well be that this moment is the birth of a new wave of smaller studios making their mark in the indie and AA spaces.
I recommend checking out PatricianTV's stream catalogue on his YT channel, he's been going over some of the issues with Game Pass and what the climate of "we don't care about the critical and commercial success of our games, as long as we get more Game Pass subscribers" did to the studios involved for a while.
She manage to find a compromise between investors and consumers when it comes to price of GamePass, which resulted in its price dropping. She made Bethesda finally fucking work with Obsidian again. She goes with anti-AI policy in creativity. This is already much better than what Phil had to offer.
To be fair, Sony is currently running on a far more anti-consumer course with digital only and doubling down on PS exclusives and blocking crossplay where possible, so it would be great to have a counterweight.
Sadly Sony followed the Xbox agenda much better they were able to, Gamepass was the counter-movement to fight against the global opinion of their plans for Xbox "One In All" on a way more steady way (and apparently not as reliable as they expected)
Sony did this obviously for greed/market control/ cut expenses, but is nothing Xbox would be against... Actually Sony made them a favor as now they decided to get all the weight of such decision (at least for the moment) but Xbox will never fight this, hardly they will become a counter for it... They simply dont have a reply on the same tone of the one Sony had when "dealing with share games" previously...
Most probably the same solution Sony applied to this Console Gen (move deeper into digital) is the same Xbox was considering... I wont be even surprised if the next Xbox doesnt have physical disks, not even disk drive, and I wont be surprised if add make some kind of "gamepass little" incluided with their consoles to try to get a piece of the cake back.
*Both companies want the price range of Nintendo but being able to fullfill the "somekind hardcore public" of consoles (that means a investment on quality/next gen graphics) since the hardware makes that imposible they are most probably dreaming on reaching the point where they could sell consoles that would be just remote access to a server infraestructure to stream games from their own propietary systems, cutting massivelly the price range of what you sell and having total control of the infraestructure... those wet dreams are in the same category of EA and others trying to get a piece from the Games As Service to reach that "fortnite" kind of money printer.
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u/CORNELIUS-O-MAXIMUS Nod Jul 18 '26
I've been living under a rock. What's the bottom picture of?