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Why did Microsoft buy all these studios if the plan was to never actually have them make anything?
I've been asking that since they bought Rare and proceeded to do nothing with them.
The only thing that matters to MS is money.
Remember when Microsoft bought Rare and did basically nothing with them for two decades?
Not nothing. They remade a bunch of games worse than the originals.
(Some people did enjoy Viva Pinata, but I didn't play that.)
Viva pinata was absolutely dope
It's one of my fondest memories on that console
Playing devil’s advocate, sometimes the blame is not solely on Microsoft.
Bethesda Softworks is a good example. They’d basically doomed Arkane to dev hell with that vampire game, and kept that little detail hidden during the acquisition; Microsoft gave them total leeway when the Arkane team supposedly hoped a “rescue” instead, and never got it.
It’s a hard argument though.
Take Phil Spencer. Just Phil Spencer. Thats an incredible crater, right there, and he failed upwards for it.
MS shot itself in the foot: MS gutted the team, then the game didn't come out right and this resulted in bad sales.
Here are the Steam sales numbers:
- DOOM (2016): 5.4M
- DOOM Eternal: 4.7M
- DOOM: The Dark Ages: 1.2M
Dark Ages is meh. 2016 was legitimately fresh, and Eternal went a kind of interesting direction, but they legitimately need to take some time and go in a brand brand new direction if they want to make more than four of these games, because the "push forward" formula + lofi sf&f aesthetic alone is not going to cut it on its own.
FYI Doom The Dark Ages was available day 1 on game pass and they were boasting on social media that they had over 3 million players on the first week if I remember right.
It's Microsoft's fault the game didn't sell. Most people (me included) opted to subscribe to game pass for a month instead.
I bought Doom 2016 and it literally wouldn't even get past the loading screen. I tried every suggestion I found online and none of them worked. I ended up refunding. It's why I never even considered the next two.
Wait, there's a new doom game? (Not joking, just noting that I've missed any mention of this whatsoever)
Yeah, this isn't news and the studio owners who can cash big checks to sell don't care.
I have talked to a mobile game Dev, a very drunker heart to heart. He had an India mobile game (like alto). He made about 120k in 5 years between two versions of the game. And then some tenent adjacent studio offered him 650k for the IP.
In his words "All I could think was that in 650k, my house would be paid. My education loan would be paid and I would still have enough money to ensure my kid goes to college and not worry about an education loan. I knew selling game would mean enshittification of my baby. But then i looked at my actual baby and I knew I had to betray the digital one"
That's the first time I saw it from the dev point of view. He wanted to keep the project, but between choosing fans of his games that can't keep a subreddit alive and doing right by no name, no face fan base vs 650k hard cash from a shitty studio that would concretely secure his family's future. I am not sure if I would hold out.
I know it's not the same with the studio Microsoft bought..... But I can't help but wonder people who sellout might not be such horrible pieces of shit that we imagine them to be.
Microsoft has a lot more problems than that, but I suppose that's the only one Steve Jobs would care about.
Steve engineers developed the iPod Touch in secret because they thought he would look at the ugly prototype and can the whole project Jobs
Steve so impossible to please as a boss that his worker developed an application for him to develop a calculator layout because nothing the other designer did was ever good enough Jobs.
Steve the iPad won't get a calculator for fourteen years even though his corpse is long since dead and buried Jobs.
anyone who is hopeful about xbox's new leadership probably isn't terribly aware of microsoft's past. they've done this dance a million times. "we're improving!" -> people believe it yet again -> surprise, they found a way to suck even more now.
Poisonous leopards never change their spots after all.
Basically: The thing everyone worried about and quite frankly knew would happen when Microsoft started buying every studios they could get their hands on... happened.
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish. It never went away. Careless incompetence. The shareholders way.
Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really expanding by buying up those studios, promising great output for them in the future!". Line goes up.
Microsoft then does nothing except investing all of their money into AI.
Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really streamlining their organisation by dumping all of those useless dead weight studios. Excellent management". Line goes up.
I absolutely hate how on the nose this is. sigh
TIL that this is a valid use of "on the nose" (definition 1). I was genuinely confused, I'm only familar with definition 2 there, "unimaginative; overliteral; lacking nuance; unsophisticated".
TIL about the second definition
We are the lucky ten thousand.
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I assume that Microsoft is trying to appeal to two different groups of shareholders. The first sees Microsoft buying up studios and assumes that the studios will be able to put out better games cheaper (by firing support staff like HR). The second group sees Microsoft cutting low performing workers and assumes that Microsoft will be able to get more profits by cutting lots of cost without losing much income. If they time it right, they can get the second group to start buying just as the first group starts selling.
Yep. They don't understand games so they buy studios that DO understand games, and then turn them into divisions of Microsoft instead of game studios and are surprised that they no longer can make games.
Im not even sure the extinguish part is intentional here. I think they are just genuinely this incompetent, but Greys Law applies here imo.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
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Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.
That implies careful planning.
In this case, MS thought just mindlessly throwing money around will somehow bring in massive profits.
Its just a vestigal instinct at MSFT these days lol.
Except, game dev companies are not competitors for MS (meaning XBOX), but essential for their survival. What's the point of extinguishing your source of supply?
They're probably banking on the fact that devs love making games, and when a bunch get laid off, some of them will inevitably go start some new studio that Microsoft can swoop in and buy again in 5-10 years, wring another game out of, then toss aside like trash again.
It's the EA strategy. Wait for a studio to get public recognition, buy it out and milk it until the devs break for the exits, start a new indie studio, rinse the blood off and repeat. Frankly every "Creative Industry" since they invented the Victrola has operated the same way, and it's only a hair's breadth different from how noble patronage worked (and arguably more exploitative). And every time anyone tried to build a more co-operative style system, they burn it to the ground with market manipulation and regulatory capture.
That seems like a bad business model to me.
It's been working so far
Only 'working' to make a few rich cunts even richer, which is not what I'd call working.
But you know what I mean right?
You have to remember that the only person who ever really wanted Microsoft to get into console gaming was Bill Gates and this was largely an extension of his own love of video games and obsession with getting MS into the living room. Other efforts included things like WebTV, MSNBC, and a device that led to the creation of TiVo. Ballmer cared about Bill’s legacy but once the two of them were gone nobody was left who gave a rat’s ass about Xbox.
They had vision and knew how to build a brand. The current CEO's idea of branding is to name their products after a tool that absolutely no one will be using.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s probably worth pointing out that the Xbox was built on the ashes of the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast ran Windows CE, a precursor of sorts to Windows Mobile. Microsoft was perfectly happy using an already wounded Sega, who had mismanaged their last two console generations and lost a lot of users to the then fairly new PlayStation line, as the test bed for the software platforms that would eventually power the Xbox, though under a slightly different hardware platform. This is why, among other things, the Duke controller looks very much like a Dreamcast controller.
Like a lot of things that Gates did, he was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Probably true, although Ballmer didn't screw it up and Nadella did screw it up for one simple reason. He's a 1 Cloud Pony. He came from the cloud and that's all he really knows, and his narrow Senior VP perspective helped him extract earnings from cloud but nothing else at Microsoft.
In the future they will have difficulty recruiting talent for projects and as a result will have to pay people way more like Meta because of the stigma.
They also don't understand software.
Or user privacy.
Or valuing their own workers.
Or how to respectfully be a part of the F/OSS ecosystem.
Or humanity's desire to not live in a pollution stream from their AI processing centers (they're not really "data centers").
Or that we all wish LinkedIn would self-destruct under the weight of its own bullshit, and magically blink itself out of existence.
Not a single fucking CEO understands art and games. They only thing they understand is profit$. That's all that matters to them.
Of something can't generate a profit, it's essentially useless. Art? If you can sell it at a profit it's good. Or doesn't matter if nobody will ever see it. Oxygen producing trees, sea weed, algae? Not worth a damn until it's cut down, collected, and sold. Food, water, shelter and basic human needs? Gotta make a profit. Don't matter if we can produce tons and people are going hungry, homeless and thirsty, if we can't generate a profit.
Capitalism is a fucking cancer. And these guys are the rogue cells that make it grow.
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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