Woah, I’m shocked that you have big doubts about Microsoft studios. Lord knows no one else ever cancels anything. 

Personally I’m not surprised it was canceled, it was supposed to release two years ago and they were very silent in 2018 about it. From the sound of things, it was just too much work to get it running at an acceptable level across all the different platforms Minecraft is on. I’d rather them put out an update that performs well rather than something that is shit, kind of like the mercy killing of Scalebound.

Could also mean they have a sequel coming and are focusing on that instead of giving the old game such a massive update. Of course, Dungeons is also coming, my kids are more excited about that than anything I’ve ever seen them get excited about outside of maybe Luigi’s Mansion 2. 

Point being, they have their plate full. If Windows and consoles were all they needed to worry about, I’m sure the update would have been out long ago. But they have different versions on Mac, which iirc used the Java version? Plus handhelds. Plus mobile. Must be insane amounts of work.

And they are wrong since Playstation and Nintendo are much more valuable and are likely to keep giving more revenue as already presented in the thread.

Game has 176million sales and they don't follow up on a huge graphic update for it which they deem to be "too ambitious" If I promised something to 100+m potential users you know what's too ambitious? Thinking they'll be fine with you cancelling work you promised them 2 years ago with no alternative offered... just... Oh you know that update from 2 years ago? yeah, cba sorry, we demo'd it 2 years ago but apparently making it work was just too much of a bother for one of the largest software companies in the world. Tragic behaviour in terms of what they deliver compared to what MS promises, I think to have faith in their PR spins in 2019 is to be having a level of faith which would be normally associated with religious groups.

This was a promis from back in 2017 I think.... along with VR and VR games, comeing to Xbox.
There was supposed to be a partnership with Occulus Rift, from Xbox.

Nothing came of it though.
Xbox One X, never got any form of VR (the promis).

Xbox doesnt have a good track record this gen, when it comes to keeping things it says or promises its fans.
Ontop of their mis-communications... Trust in Xbox as a brand hasnt been this low in a while (imo), and you can tell from its fan base (on youtube/twitter ect).

Also remember Halo Lense?
Back when xbox fans where makeing fun of PSVR? claiming it + mixed reality, would be the next big thing, and be for the Xbox?

What happend? it turned out to be a 5000$+, and not really usable for a console.... and not for mass market.
I wouldnt be surprised if theres less than 50 of them ever made, and research & developement into it, is just dropped.

How dis-honest was all that Minecraft VR crap with the Halo Lense they showed off?
Like normal people would ever be able to buy one or play minecraft like that... even what they showed was not actually what it was like wearing the headset.

I question their 'brand' metrics. In terms of market value of course MS certain beats the other two consistently. Their XBOX division however, not so much. Regardless of these articles merits. Other 'brand' metrics put the other two above XBOX. I question the validity of that too without delving deeper into the methods.

Personally I would find mindshare and pure sales (over multiple generations as well) to be the better way of measuring whether a Brand or division is doing better and has more market value over the long term.

Will wait for the deflective "MS isn't the only company to cancel games, isn't the only company to close studios, isn't the only company to do 180 all the time, etc".

A brand is nothing more than a label, associated with a certain company's goods and services. A brand's value is tied to the perceived quality of the goods and services under said brand. Since Microsoft is (soon to be) 3rd place in console sales, and 2nd place in revenue (from gaming), it is obvious that the quality of their goods and services is not perceived as very high by the average gaming customer. In a couple years Xbox will lag behind even Nintendo in gaming revenue simply because they will have to start a new generation, while Nintendo will be at the peak of their own console cycle.

Furthermore, both Nintendo and Sony have multiple game IPs under their brands that sell 10+ million. Microsoft has none. Some might argue that Minecraft would count, but Minecraft is available on every platform, and thus isn't associated with the Xbox brand by the majority of consumers. Whether it truly falls under the Xbox brand or not is beside the point. And since it isn't associated with Xbox, the value of the Minecraft IP doesn't add to the perceived quality of the Xbox brand. Neither Halo, nor Gears, nor Forza have sold 10+ Million copies.

And let's not even get into how the latest batch of critical duds under the Xbox brand have devalued it. Perhaps those games are enjoyable, but when so many consumers see really low review scores, the perceived value of Xbox branded games is lowered.

The whole notion of Xbox being the highest valued brand in gaming is just ludicrous on multiple levels.

Kinda lost interest in whataboutism and slippery slope as argument tactics on here, there's no point in discussing Star Fox 2 not coming out for the SNES in a thread about the Xbox brand power. I'd rather speak about the things that brand is doing as I was going back and forth with @Chazore in the article about this mod being dropped I was just kinda shocked because there is amazing modders on the PC side of MC who have graphics addons which made the "overly ambitious" one that Mojang were working on look shoddy and yeah... Mojang/Xbox game studios/MS effectively have infinite money and they couldn't reach out to some of that modding community and check them a 6 figure amount to come on board and give them access to Microsoft's hardware and software to build tho fan made add-ons into a "super duper" project if they couldn't do anything over the last 24 months.

Naw... they fire money at other studios instead who are already making games so that those games won't appear on other systems, rather than spending some money on what they already have, ya know.... a game which sold 176m units over all systems. It is without question the largest gaming IP that Microsoft owns and a upgrade for the graphics to that 10 year old title was deemed to not be worth completing. Crazy.

For me the only explanation for it is that they just invented an excuse because they are working on Minecraft 2 and will use the assets they developed to Super Duper. I refuse to accept they would be so incompetent that they couldn't make it even if limiting to X1X and PC.

They are masters of software design and unlike somewhere like Apple they've created both Software packages and OS's for such a wide range of hardware, you could go off and install windows server 2016 onto an intel Atom if you wanted to and strip it down to the point where you could use it as a simple DHCP server for your network if you wanted to, but I just mean that if MS can't basically set up a game to allow it to make use of 100s of GB of RAM and a 2080TI but then scale that back to someone playing on a potato with a 710 that they got off ebay by searching for "gaming PC" (honestly check that shit out, it annoys me so much that they can list those trash as gaming PC's) but yeah scaling for hardware is something the game should be able to do fine, heck even give the user some options, on the Switch disable the setting by default, offer some aspects of it like the amazing light shafts and allow users to scale what is important to them, super shiny graphics with massive draw distances, or 60fps locked. I mean on Switch already you can even choose between rendering just 4 chunks around you and scaling it out to.... I think 14 but I'm not 100% on that.

I'm just saying, this should have been a relatively easy job, especially given they've had 2 years to work on it, if someone was doing any work on this for 2 years they must have realised months ago that it was never going to be released since the internet interest dropped to the point where so little was being done on it.