Xbox Game was doomed to failure after the first day

A few days ago, we were talking with a friend about the fact that communist systems are probably the best platform for cultivating art and creativity; A system in which everyone has fixed and equal rights and they do not work in order to raise the graph of the capitalist and create value for the shareholder. Cinematic masterpieces that were made under Soviet rule instead, Tetris, one of the greatest games in history, was created by an employee of the Soviet computer department. Fixed salaries, job security, and focus on creation and creativity without considering sales, were all promises that Xbox and Microsoft made to every studio they acquired, only to beat them all a few years later and in one or two moves, fire everyone and cancel the production of games. The Xbox game was a big lie from the start.

Despite Phil Spencer, Dan Metrick’s name as the worst manager in Xbox history has gone down really bad. I’ve talked enough about Phil Spencer’s failed plans for Xbox and Game Pass subscriptions (that was two years ago) and by now we all know where these plans to turn Xbox Game Pass into the Netflix of video games have ended up.

At the time when I wrote the above article, the Tango Gameworks studio had not been shut down, the Arkin studio had not been reduced to a small branch, Starfield had not experienced its scandalous failure, Halo had not been forgotten, Perfect Dark, which everyone raised, had not joined history; Basically, this box still kept the 10,000 people it fired over the past year in its studios making games.

Phil Spencer’s promises turned out to be empty after another. The person who ridiculed PlayStation 5 Pro and said that $1,000 consoles are not the future of the game industry, now comes and presents a $1,000 hand-held computer that is not even a console and does not have the ability to play Xbox games.

Two years ago, when I was writing that article, not a single Xbox game had yet made its way to the PlayStation; Today, there’s Forza and Gears of War on PlayStation, and as someone who sees the 7th generation console fights as part of video game history, months after Gears of War was released on PlayStation 5, I still can’t wrap my head around it.

What I want to talk about today is no longer Xbox policies and rooting for their decisions and Microsoft’s monetization deadlines; Rather, it is a downward trend that has more or less started and is hurting Xbox’s identity from every direction.

Tomonobu Itagaki, who passed away two or three days ago, was a staunch supporter of Xbox, the one who made Dead or Alive 3 an exclusive Xbox game and, with strong hardware support, provided an experience that coincided with the launch of Microsoft’s new console that had never been seen before, not only among fighting games, but also in the gaming industry. was Dead or Alive 3 was so good that it sold one million copies in six months; As an exclusive console game that no one had ever heard of.

Xbox exclusives were head and neck higher than competitors in terms of quality. Dead or Alive 3 was released in 2001 at the same time as Xbox.

We haven’t hammered the exclusivity of “Ninja Gaiden” as the best action game of our time on PlayStation fans for years, that one day Microsoft will launch the campaign “Everything you can think of is an Xbox” (This is an Xbox) and take the only remaining identity element of Xbox, which is its console, from this brand.

Above, I started the conversation with the big lies that Microsoft gave to many game developers. During an interview several years ago, “Tim Schieffer” (Director of Double Fine Studio), “Fergus Urquhart” (Director of Obsidian) and “Brian Fargo” (Director of Inxile) stated the reason for selling their studios to Microsoft: Xbox has promised not to do anything to the studios and let them make games themselves and fill the Gameplay subscription archive with content. After the massive shutdowns and layoffs at Xbox over the past year or two, how can all those other game developers trust Microsoft and make their own games safely?

It didn’t take long until the directors of the studios under the supervision of Xbox came out one after another from the companies that they had founded themselves. “Tamim Antoniades”, who was the mastermind of “Ninja Theory”, came out earlier than the others, and we saw the result of his absence completely in Hellblade 2. The art director of the Hilo games series left the company last week and after 17 years of working on this series, and although he did not directly say the reason for his departure, we have heard that the reason is Microsoft’s requirement to use artificial intelligence, the use of which has penetrated even the artistic departments of the Hilo studio; A topic that is nothing but pure disrespect to real artists.

When “everything” is Xbox, Xbox doesn’t mean anything anymore.

Xbox consoles don’t sell and even the construction of their next console is in an aura of uncertainty; Rumors say that if Microsoft had not signed a contract with AMD several years ago to build the next generation console, there would be no other Xbox.

Well, the Xbox consoles that don’t sell (and Microsoft raises the price of all its consoles twice in four months), those single games that all the Xbox studios make don’t sell, because their audience plays all the games on the Xbox Game Pass and no one buys the games. (According to the information published by Bloomberg, last year’s release of Call of Duty on the Game Pass subscription caused a great damage to the sales of the game, and the new Game Pass subscriptions did not bring enough to prevent the loss caused by the lower sales).

Xbox (which is now forced to make money from Microsoft) saw the only way in front of it: increasing the subscription price of Gameplay.

Microsoft increased not a few dollars, but the monthly subscription price of Game Pass by 50%, and its reasonable level, which includes four games, now costs $360 a year! Netflix’s idea of ​​Phil Spencer’s game, which was supposed to make its way into everyone’s home, is currently the most expensive entertainment subscription in the world.

It was not out of mind that after the announcement of this price increase, a large number of current subscribers would want to cancel their subscription as soon as possible; So much so that the Xbox site and the subscription cancellation page were unavailable for hours. 360 dollars a year is the price of some first-rate and expensive games on the day of their release, and if someone wants to spend that much, they will buy the same game.

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The root of all the disasters that have befallen Xbox is only one thing: the seventy billion dollar deal to buy Activision. Phil Spencer thought he was going to spend forever out of Microsoft’s pocket, buy Call of Duty and put it back on the game and nobody would say a word.

Xbox is still in the red, and if Microsoft is going to insist on a financial return on its $70 billion acquisition of Activision, no Xbox division will have a good future. All those tens of thousands of people who are working in Xbox and the studios and companies under their control are in danger of being fired all the time. “Jason Schreier”, the most reliable journalist in the field of video games, recently and after the announcement of the cancellation of a large number of Xbox games, said that we should wait for the next wave of layoffs from Microsoft.

One branch of the American Walmart store has filled all the Xbox shelves with Nintendo Switch 2 games.

On the same day that Microsoft laid off 7,000 people, Phil Spencer said in an email to Xbox survivors: “We are in the best period of the company, we have the most players, we have the most games, and the most hours played. “Our platform, our hardware and our games have never been stronger than they are now.”

Let’s go back to the beginning of the story. Under the domination of the military, which allows a few companies to swallow all the big and small players of an industry in the true sense of the word and dominate it completely, no creative work and no art is going to be made; Even Ubisoft and Electronic Arts, who instead of making games, get a checklist and tick each one of them, will not last in this system, and the further we go, the more we are convinced that we should not have allowed our entertainment to become the biggest entertainment industry in the world.