As Xbox prepares to lose five development studios and over 3,000 staff what is it that they’re planning, that makes Microsoft so confident for the future?
Even if Monday’s mass layoffs at Xbox hadn’t already been rumoured, they were easy enough to predict. After all, laying off thousands of developers is exactly what Microsoft did this time last year and the year before that. Over 9,000 people have been laid off from the Xbox division in just the last three years and there’s little reason to think that number won’t rise again next year. There’s even less reason to think any of this is helping Xbox as a business, if that’s even the goal anymore.
There are already conspiracies, propagated by one of the original founders of Xbox, that new boss Asha Sharma has been brought in to wind down the business. That does seem like it could be true, not necessarily based on what she’s doing but because Xbox as a brand feels like it has nowhere to go and, if it wasn’t owned by the richest company in the world, would long ago have been sold off or mothballed.
But Microsoft is still refusing to admit defeat and for a company that has over 225,000 people worldwide 9,000 is just a drop in the ocean. But that’s part of the problem, because if they were a normal company, where that volume of layoffs would be keenly felt, they’d be forced to take a more objective view of the situation.
Xbox will be 25 years old this autumn, but it was only really a power player for the first five years of the Xbox 360’s lifetime, after which it gave up its comfortable lead over the PlayStation 3 to chase the success of the Wii. This demonstrated one of Xbox’s longstanding faults: a complete lack of patience. The original Xbox was abandoned early in favour of the Xbox 360, then the Xbox 360 was abandoned in favour of Kinect, and then there was a bizarre obsession with TV for the launch of the Xbox One and, well… you know the rest.
We covered all this when Microsoft raised the price of Game Pass back in October, a decision that, true to form, they didn’t stick with. Xbox’s problems are manifold but their obsession with always looking for a short cut and never nurturing and growing the successes they do have are a recurring theme. One it seems Sharma may have identified.
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It’s hard to tell exactly what Sharma thinks, given the indecipherable corporate speak she indulges in (which already sounds disarmingly like one of Phil Spencer’s scripts, right down to the bizarre goal of having 1 billion daily players) but this time she emphasised having ‘greater focus’. She didn’t say on what but based on her previous comments the obvious guess is those franchises most closely associated with Xbox (Halo, Gears Of War, Forza, and perhaps Fable) and Bethesda’s big hitters of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls.
Microsoft is legally obligated to keep Call Of Duty multiformat for several more years, so that franchise doesn’t factor into anything but their bottom line – especially after they stopped releasing it day one on Game Pass.
Sharma’s already expressed frustration at how long it’s taking to make a new Elder Scrolls and Fallout and she’s every right to do so, as Bethesda has been underperforming, in the quality and quantity of their releases, since at least Fallout 4 in 2015. A bold decision would’ve been to replace Todd Howard with new management but of, course, it’s the ordinary wage slaves that are made to suffer for a publisher’s failures, not the executives.
What will be done about Bethesda’s franchises is unclear but the obvious thing is to farm new entries out to other studios. The fact that Microsoft has owned Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian for eight years and hasn’t got so much as a remaster out of them is just one more example of bad management decisions and an inability to prioritise and schedule new releases sensibly.
People do at least want new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games though, as well as more Forza Horizon, but it’s unclear whether they feel the same about Halo and Gears Of War. Both are outdated in terms of gameplay and the latter in almost every respect, with its roided-out machomen seeming so 2006. Neither franchise prospered outside of the Xbox 360 era and while you could say that’s also due to mismanagement sometimes games are just of a certain time and place and don’t travel as far as their publishers would like them to.
Nevertheless, it seems likely Microsoft is planning to focus squarely on these franchises and to give up on the more avant-garde titles that the likes of Double Fine and Ninja Theory trade in. The latter is perfectly reasonable – a company like Microsoft should never have bought them in the first place, as Sharma seems to recognise. But focusing Xbox on Halo, Gears Of War, Forza, and Bethesda? They’ve tried that before and it didn’t work.
Having lost so many staff, and so many studios, the options for Xbox are now limited. They will need to rely more on third party developers (not that there are many big ones left, after they inspired a buying spree across the whole industry) and they will have to make a proper decision about going multiformat, rather than the nonsensical excuses they made for Gears Of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution.
The sensible decision would be to drop plans for Project Helix (even if there is anyone out there still willing to buy Xbox hardware the price alone will make it an irrelevance) and become a full-bloodied third party publisher, something like EA were back in their heyday, when they released more games than just sports titles and Battlefield. But everything Sharma has said, especially this week, seems to imply they’re not doing that.
Instead, Xbox continues to live in denial, of the fact that nobody was buying their hardware even before the memory crisis raised prices, and that except for Forza Horizon nobody is very interested in their first party games either. If Sharma is secretly winding down Xbox, or planning to sell it off, she’s really committing to the deception, but the far more likely truth is that she’s doing exactly what it looks like: trying to turn the clock back to the pre-Xbox Series X days, if not pre-Xbox One.
No doubt that sounds like a good idea in the boardroom but it makes no practical sense. You can’t make games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars exclusive on a console that too few people own, because it’s impossible to make your money back. And nobody’s going to buy new hardware in order to play new entries in franchises that reached their natural end 15 years ago. Not to mention the folly of even thinking about making The Elder Scrolls 6 an exclusive.
If that’s not Sharma’s plan then good, because maybe it’ll have a chance of succeeding but it’s the only obvious option for her, based on her recent statements and her current resources. If she has an ace up her sleeve, that no one is yet aware of, then that would be the best news possible for the whole games industry, as we’ve already see how Sony is carrying on when they have no serious competition. But it’s very hard to believe there’s any magic wand about to be waved and, in all probability, Xbox really is as doomed and desperate as it seems.
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