The whole industry is going all-in on big IP. Just look at some moves from major publishers in the first half of 2025:
- Warner Bros. is only making games based on Mortal Kombat, DC, Game of Thrones and HP.
- EA is doubling down on Battlefield, The Sims and its sports games, trying to revive Apex, while staying away from new licensed IPs.
- Take-Two is focused on GTA, Red Dead, Borderlands and Civilization. They even sold Private Division because, in their own words: "We're in the business of making big great hits."
- Ubisoft created a new subsidiary just to handle Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six and Far Cry.
- Square Enix is cutting back hard—"quality over quantity"—and scrapped a bunch of unannounced projects.
And then there's Microsoft, now the biggest game publisher on the planet. They're going to follow the same way.
On top of that, MS is slowly moving away from being a platform holder to just being a third-party publisher. That's a big change because when you're not managing a console ecosystem (and Game Pass is less important than 5 years ago), you don't need variety, you need hits. And if a game costs a ton, takes 5–6 years, and doesn't make a big splash the developer is probably getting canned or the publishing agreement finished.
I don't like this either, but among other things, this is the result of most people sticking to the same few games: CoD, Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox… In this scenario if your game isn't huge and can't hold attention for long enough, maybe it's just not worth the investment—especially when you're publishing at Microsoft's scale.
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Saw this post by Idas and it's really depressing when you look at statements from recent 3rd parties.
Saw this thread chain by Seamus too (Xbox Father).
It feels like he's telling Xbox leadership to fight harder to protect their employees from the money grubbing cunts at Microsoft. Honestly Phil needs to resign though, how can he show his face in the Xbox company to his employees when he has gone through multiple successive thousands of employees layoffs then he's going to celebrate the 25th Xbox anniversary? He has failed his employees.
Why should Xbox employees give a shit about Microsoft when they don't give a shit about them? Why should they work hard to deliver great products when it doesn't matter anyway? They'll get laid off either way whether they make something terrible or make something amazing! Microsoft doesn't care, they only care about the line on a graph. Microsoft is incapable of understanding what massive layoffs every 6 months do to employee morale because Microsoft is incapable of empathy.
How can people work under these conditions? Living under constant fear of being laid off and knowing it doesn't matter how hard you work, how good of a product you make, you're just a number on a chart that is available to be sacrificed to the Line God and there is literally nothing you can do to guarantee your job is safe. This industry is going to lose so much talent when these people inevitably fuck off out of it and join a different industry where they aren't treated like shit being laid off every 6 months but hey at least we'll have AI right Satya? /S.
I can't say I'm a fan of Xbox at all now, I'm only a fan of the developers/IP under Xbox because they own a lot of amazing developers and employee a lot of amazing people, they have a lot of IP that I still love, these incredible developers still make brilliant videogames for us, the only support shown should be towards them.
