Your assessment is on point, but you have to give Phil SOMEWHAT of a break.
Xbox was getting shut down and the only think that kept them in the race was Phil promising Nadella he could turn Xbox into the Netflix of gaming.
Xbox was never at risk of getting shut down. It was still a valuable profitable business. MS would have spun it out as a separate company, or more likely sold it off to Samsung, Amazon, Google or some other company waiting in the wings to enter the market.
In the grand scheme of things, that would have probably been much much better for Xbox.
It's like running away from someone on rooftop who is chasing you with a gun and saying the fall from the jump killed you... yeah sure technically that's right, but you wouldn't have jumped at all if you hadn't been worried about the guy with the gun.
This pretends that all the decisions Spencer has made with Xbox have been the only possible options available to him. That's simply not true. The situation was never a dichotomy between get shut down or flush the traditional console business down the shitter.
Spencer could have made MUCH better decisions long before they started floundering which led to Xbox almost getting sold off. And even afterwards, when going all in on GamePass, he could have focused on FP development and wholly-funded 3rd party games, instead of going after entire multiplatform publishers.
By blowing $80bln on Activision, after spending $7bln on Zenimax, Xbox was going to be forced into becoming third party publisher. They were NEVER going to get enough GP subs and Xbox GP subs to support making all those publisher's games exclusive. Spencer and co. literally deluded themselves into thinking they could, until after the deal was done and the MS CFO came in and was like, "errr... no. You can't just shit $80bln of MS money down the crapper. You need this acquisition to provide a ROI."
At which point, Xbox hardware has become completely redundant.
Xbox was already dead, Phil Spencer just got a second lease on life for it. He took a hail mary and he threw an interception. That's kind of the odds you get with a hail mary.
Xbox was not already dead when Spencer took over. Xbox was already dead almost half a decade later because of Spencer's poor leadership of the brand... I mean... going nearly half a decade with almost no notable first party games to speak of for your platform will do that.
GamePass is closer to Movie Pass than it is Netflix. Netflix ramped up their spending in conjunction with their audience to become an indispensable brand. MoviePass tried to subsidize their way into a market position by creating an audience large enough that they could gain leverage over theaters. Microsoft needed to create leverage over publishers where games couldn't exist without being on GamePass, but games were still selling on PS5, Switch and PC. Microsoft never had the leverage to make GamePass successful. Now they're overlevereged themselves.
Agreed. Which was all the fault of Spencer. GP was never a bad idea. Their chosen strategy with it was what was entirely delusional. They never had a realistic plan because Spencer and his team were completely divorced from reality. Out of touch with gamers. Out of touch with the market, and out of touch with any kind of realistic expectation for his gamepass service.
If Microsoft wasn't bankrolling xbox, they'd have gone under almost a decade ago.
Yes. But MS and their fucked up corporate culture that creates bubbles that their execs live in, is also part of the problem for Xbox. It's no surprise that the successor of a delusional Mattrick ended up being even more delusional. And none of the execs working under or with Spencer in that organisation are any less disconnected from what gamers want ot what the market wants as Spencer himself. It's the culture that creates that kind of collective self-delusion and it's rampant across MS.
I respectfully disagree chap, I watched the whole thing unfold and based on my own small sample of anecdotal evidence.. i.e. me and 4 gamer mates whom all had xbox360s and where looking forward to the new Xbox, then the reveal happened, then the mixed messaging, then the massive performance differential (hilariously downplayed by Xbox) and imo that was when the nail was driven into the coffin, in the years that followed subsequent blows just kept hammering it in but it can all be traced back to losing the previous generation hard...
We all bought went out and bought PlayStations for the first time, built up our digital libraries and are now firmly rooted in the Sony ecosystem, don't underestimate how much of a massive fuck up it was
You are not the market and your anecdote doesn't represent the majority of Xbox gamers. Xbox easily could have recovered from the Xbox One era, but they were stymied by horseshit management that consistently fucked up because they consistently refused to actually listen to the gaming market.
DenchDeckard
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