Xbox |OT|

[Ryuu96]

the-pi-guy said:

Ryuu96 said:

That tweet is definitely confirming it, business update says it all.

I still think this was a decision made last Holiday, I also believe still it comes from Microsoft, in the emails Phil was all in on exclusivity and out of nowhere decided to make all Zenimax titles exclusive to what looked like the annoyance of his CFO, Lmao.

Plus if it was long term, they simply would have told the FTC/CMA...Or the FTC/CMA would have found it out when they gathered thousands of emails from Microsoft. So it's very evident that this decision was made Holiday 2023. Something broke, I'm curious what it was. Probably after ABK the number crunchers came in since Xbox has big responsibilities on its shoulders now.

I think the fact that the gap accelerated last quarter, despite MS pushing hard on sales, and that Starfield didn't change things the way it probably was supposed to.

Yeah I think so too.

I think it was a combination of Starfield barely moving Xbox consoles, despite the massive hype behind it and it being what was meant to be a massive IP with serious hardware moving power, then you look at the future roadmap and realise no exclusive will come close to that sort of console moving power until Elder Scrolls VI which is God knows when so they have to HOPE that instead dozens of exclusives released over years and hundreds of millions in investment would reverse the quite frankly dire trend of Xbox hardware.

Then they practically had fire sales for Xbox with huge discounts and it still didn't do great, it was even below Microsoft's expectations, now their Q1 guidance is quite frankly horrific, they expect to do $300m in hardware (consoles, controllers and accessories) for the next quarter. November had the worst Xbox sales in the USA since 2006. Series X as low as $350 in the USA and still performed below expectations. Then ABK came in and they probably saw the profit margins ABK makes on their games but also all the costs of all these new employees and well...

Probably a little miffed about all the trouble during the court trial too.