Man this video hits right in the feels.

Corp greed, and CEO catering to Shareholders...  who have no clue about gaming,
what made these companies big and popular, and who dont care about the product at all, only the profits. 

I've said the same thing with the Live services type games.
That because returns can sometimes be 20 times bigger than say a good "normal" successfull game (say a one and done), even if chances of it failing are 10-15 times higher, the lure of the profits a GaaS game can make, makes them gamble for it.  Which might make bussiness sense, if it only takes 1 mega hit, to more than make up for alot of failours.

The thing is, as a consumer, its gonna suck..... dev times are so long already, and no one wants to see a million failed GaaS games, much less play them.

Steve Jobs was the GOAT.

There is a disconnect between the consumer (gamer) and the shareholders (that are trend chaseing, and only care for possible profits returns)

We call those games on consoles "filler".
The switch being a handheld, it has way more of that then ps or xbox, but theres horrible games there too.
Remember "Life of a lion" ? or whatever it was called (black tiger?) lol.

Anyways lucky you can just ignore those types of games. (ones that make you go "is this just a ported mobile game", or worse effort ones).
(steam has a ton of this crap too, like games so bad, they shouldnt even be there)

Yes it sucks, that low effect on mobile is so profittable.

I feel like Nintendo is a good middle ground.
They get away with not wasteing tons of cutscenes, mocap, voice actings, complex story telling element (writers) ect.
They have a more simple approach, thats usually focused on the gameplay elements instead.

Its why their profit margins are much better than playstation and xbox's.
Maybe games on xbox/ps have grown to big, with too much money spent on things that can be scaled back or partly ignored.

No doubt, in future stuff like voice acting will just be A.I.
Maybe actors will just be generated by A.I as well.

Stuff like that could help reduce costs of these big AAA games, but it'll be at the cost of people's jobs.

Let me be the first one to say that the original post is a disgusting piece of pro-Xbox propaganda. I say this, because it is.

Valve is different because they hardly make any games to begin with. So no good reason to point them out as a good example.

Nintendo does have to answer to shareholders. In the past Nintendo did have to explain to them why they aren't laying off game developers. Their answer was that game developers are an asset necessary to drive future growth, because video games are central to the video game business. So if Phil Spencer was given the choice like the the original poster suggests, then Phil's answer should have been what Nintendo said.

Capitalism isn't the problem here. Microsoft's ineptitude at gaming, including everyone who works in the Xbox division, is.

Let me be the first to reply. 

Valve make games.

Both Valve and Nintendo dont have parant companies to fill their pockets. Decisions are all internal. Watch it change if one gets brought out.

Capitalism is the problem because the gaming industry has become more corporate now than it was in the 80s and 90s. 

Also, wtf, propaganda? You alright?

I work in a head office with corporate suits, i see and hear the exact same things happen outside of gaming. People just believe gaming is a passion industry where companies make games and dont care about money when its the exact opposite. Its become a moneypit for corpos.

People are starting to see the reality of the industry. Its not a fairyland filled with volunteer workers sacrificing themselves to make games for us. Its filled with paid workers and suits who all act the same way with any other industry.

That's the thing, he knew way back then what was coming before any of us were even born, and by the time he saw it unfolding, he had basically passed on by, as the rest of the industry just went about doing what he talked about 2 decades prior. 

The other part that gets me, I can't remember the dev who said it, but I remember reading a tweet from them last year, where they said something along the lines of: "While we were making those games people loved so much, the ones that would always make fun of us for being nerds, would slowly catch up and fill in the ranks, now they're the ones running the show, and we're the ones looking for another job". 

I mean it makes sense to a point, if you look at those disinterested in gaming, who only focus on making money and know how to make it, decide to invade one of the world's most popular and booming markets, to make said money. They don't seem to care about the overall health of the customer/product relationships, and only focus on the line going up or down, and attending those share holder calls, to make sure things go smoothly with them (not the customer, we only get PR and still have to pay for everything else).

As much as I liked playing Helldivers 2, I honestly don't see that game having long-term success, mostly because Sony is likely to demand more payout from the game itself, and it is so far the least predatory live service game on the market, but it's also not going to make money from the few who decide to spend money on super credits for what amounts to a £10/$10 warbond pack (compared to other cash shops, like Diablo IV's one, where you buy a horse armour for a whopping $30, it makes HD2's one MT so small).

I just feel like Live service games are designed at the core to have to make a lot of money to keep those lights on, but to also fund whoever runs it for another game, because you can't just run a live service title and just be at a neutral line throughout it's lifespan (it has to cover it's costs and ongoing services, but HD2 has likely covered this by now). I just wish we could return to SP only games, and MP only based games with dedicated servers, instead of amalgamations like PVPVE, extraction games, all of which end up being a blend of PVE/PVP and made into live service models (I honestly don't believe in either of those recent combinations, since PVE SP games have worked just fine since gaming began, and PVP only works fine as well, as long as it is supported). 

Personally I'd love to see shareholders go, or at least be paid less attention to, but I know how the current state of capitalism works, you piss off the shareholders, they not only take their money from you, but they'll also dispose of their shares as well, double tanking any company, whilst all customers get to do is stop buying a product and maybe selling some of the few shares they own (this is why I hate the amount of power shareholders have over the customer). 

Who could forget Black Tiger lol, that was such clusterfuck of a release.

I know all stores now have their floodgates mostly open. Steam has had theirs open for years afaik, Epic opened theirs I think 2-3yrs ago?, which is now filled with garbage gunk like crypto "games" and other crap, that you now have to sift through, but their client doesn't support as many filters as Steam does or ways to completely block out junk apps. 

I wouldn't entirely say Ninty is a good middle-ground, as their digital storefront is loaded with crap, I'm talking mobile games bare-bones ported to the switch, and they don't shy away from letting you know it's a mobile game cash grab, but Nintendo for some reason doesn't enforce all those mobile based devs to make their games 100% for Switch.

Outside their storefront, they don't really waste money on what they make (unless it's paying lawyers to hunt down anything related to them, but I'm not sure on how much it costs for them to keep doing that, let alone paying the people to actively make it their job to track down that kind of content). They're a lot more flexible than MS and Sony, that's for sure. They managed to sell the Wii U without breaking the bank, unlike Sony from their previous gen, and then MS with their following gen. 

Also Iwata took his pay cut for the sake of the company/staff, instead of doing what the West tend to do and cut the staff, pocket the money, earn a raise. The West barely does this, because in their minds it's "nothing ventured, nothing gained, it's free money", rather than doing it out of respect, and being happy with what you have (seriously, Bobby and Phil earn more than enough money in their entire lives, that they could easily part with multiple salary cuts and still fund their lavish lifestyles). 

Budgets have only grown larger sure, but that's mostly down to aspects like marketing (which in this day and age we barely need, because word of mouth now spreads like wildfire, and well, the net exists, influencers now exist, giving us more sources of knowledge than any tv/billboard ad ever will), and getting the studio in order, the amount of staff required to build said project, legalities, lawyers to comb out ToS, the engine and tech for the games themselves, etc. 

AAA is becoming unsustainable for sure, but it's up to the bigger fish to decide what to cut down on first, and well, they've idiotically chosen the very studios and talented staff who make the actual games, to go first, rather than say, the marketing dept. See the more you keep dismantling studios, the more you fracture talent pools that helped make beloved products, and the more that happens, the more that pool gets shifted about.

Now you might get old talent mixed with new talent, and that can sometimes give a good combo of results for a good product (BotW for example was Nintendo mixing old and younger generational talent and it worked well for them). However, if you keep splitting talent up, like say, vet staff who helped make a great trilogy of movies/games, then you wanting that same vibe, that same taste, or what you loved about said movies/games, won't always be the same, because that pool has been split into pieces (sometimes you see them reform as a new studio, it happens, but not s often).

Like for a quick example; I loved Disney's animated movies for decades, and while the first generation has literally passed on, the 2nd gen being mostly old and retired by now, means we've still got the current 2 gens of Disney animators, but Disney over the past decade decade and a half, has been moving away from traditional animation and into CGI based, while also just cutting projects and staff left and right. Fast forward to today, and all those movies I liked from the 90's/2000's?, yeah, most of those animators are gone, either going solo or working with some other studios, but fragmented, so I'm never going to get what I experienced way back then, and that's what I'm seeing happening right now in gaming (Arkane being gone now means I won't be getting that Dishonoured vibe for a long time, if at all, same goes for Saints Row, and Rocksteady). 

Gaming industry is just moving up and down and sideways all the time. With time it self corrects. Let's see some trends currently:

Start up studio's with the only purpose of being bought by a big player for big money, so the founders can retire after 1 (half) finished game: Looks to go the way of the dodo. These are the typical I'm going to start a new AAA studio people. Why a AAA as your first real game? Because looking for a buyer. Not a sure bet in this economy.

Experienced talented Indy studio's are getting more interesting and important. Sure some will fail. But also many will be successful not hampered by the weight of corporate expectations. See as examples Super Giant Games, Larian studio's or Sabotage. These kind of studio's do not want a corporate overlord, make games born out of passion projects and will increase their foot print.

Online games (incl. Cloud) require infrastructure to support those games. Infrastructure cost money to build up, run and maintain. Those are recurring cost. Therefore the industry is looking for recurring revenue. Hence GAAS, subscriptions and the like. That is not going away, because you cannot support a one-and-done online game's recurring costs, without some sort of recurring revenue into eternity.

XBox specifically. I think this will in the end go as well as the Windows Phone after buying Nokia. There is to much corporate pressure for creatives to do their thing. To much excel management. Microsoft has this vision of revolutionizing the games industry and be the prime beneficiary of it. But when the basics of delivering a steady flow of good games isn't met, then every vision can be thrown in the trash can.

If you are going to reply to me, address my points instead of repeating the wrong things you said in your original post.

Dishonored is made by Arkane Lyon, it's Arkane Austin that is shutting down.

It reads like propaganda because you pre-emptively excluded Nintendo for all the wrongs reasons, this is probably because you know your inaccurate observations are only passable if you get to pick and choose the players you can apply your said observations to. 

While I have not been active online recently, last I checked, Nintendo is a publicly owned company with vicious shareholders like freaking Mohammad Bin Salman.

I know many are trying really hard to set the narrative that this is an industry wide problem when in reality, the biggest company in the world can play by a different set of rules if they want to, just like Nintendo does, but the truth is; this is MS just being MS. 

Now, do I believe that things are being blown out of proportion? Partly, yes, but the lack of "we are listening" tweets and the follow-up podcast by Phil Spencer makes me strongly suspect there is a lot more to come. He may have realised, organically, that he needs to talk less, but the timing is too convenient. Let's watch this space.