Xbox |OT|

[aTokenYeti]

https://twistedvoxel.com/hi-fi-rush-failed-sales-microsoft-unhappy-state-xbox/

“ He mentioned that, assuming the Activision Blizzard King acquisition goes through, Call of Duty could serve the role of a bigger title that draws in massive micro-transaction revenue, paving the way for smaller, experimental titles to exist. That said, Grubb added that it still feels like Microsoft’s decision making with respect to game management seems “sloppy”.”

“ Later in the podcast, Grubb stated that the management at Microsoft is unhappy with the current state of Xbox. He added that the company didn’t release a first-party game in the year 2022. According to him, while that may not affect some people, it does make others regret their console purchase decision. There is hope that the upcoming Xbox Games Showcase will address things on that front, and that things will be better for the publisher in 2023.”


What little sales data is available suggests that the Xbox Series consoles were tracking well ahead of Xbox one launch aligned sales and were more or less selling everything they made until about Q4 of 2022, and the lack of major software releases combined with a not insignificant portion of Series X chips being taken out of the supply chain for xcloud deployment created a perfect storm of the only Xbox being available being the one people don’t want right now (the series S) and no new first party software to boot. Console sales for the Series have plummeted since that point.
I think that point in the first paragraph is largely correct, realistically COD will subsidize the rest of XGS.

But a situation like 2022 cannot be allowed to happen again if they want a sustainable position in the console market. Some of this is arguably out of their control (Redfall and Starfield were clearly not ready and forcing them out last year would have been a mistake), but there are a lot of planning choices they could have made to mitigate and account for delays.
For example, releasing Gears 5 in 2019, instead of delaying it a year for polish and then using it as the main launch exclusive. And from there, imagine if Halo Infinite launched in 2022 in its current state rather than 2021 in the state that it did.

A 1 2 3 4 flagship release cadence for the first 4 years of the generation of Gears 5, Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite, and then Starfield. As opposed to releasing gears at the end of a generation people had stopped caring about, then releasing two flagship titles within a month of each other in 2021, then nothing for 2022, then pinning all of your hopes on 2023.

Just seems like a lot of their content problems have relatively easy fixes, which makes me think maybe I’m missing something