Some moments force you to step back and take stock of a situation, and last week was as good (read: bad) as any: Microsoft announced that it’s laying off another 9,000 people, many of them in games. Meanwhile, Windows has been repeatedly enshittified, Office sucks, Xbox is everywhere and nowhere all at once, and the company is forcing AI down everybody’s throats, including those of its remaining employees. It is also aiding and abetting a genocide in Gaza via its Azure cloud and AI services. Nobody asked for this, and we don’t have to put up with it.
Recently, Luke argued that Microsoft should try laying off one person, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, instead of thousands. I don’t hate this idea! But I also immediately saw people reply to Luke’s piece by saying that Xbox president Sarah Bond and/or Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty are the real problem; Spencer is merely the smug face of this flailing operation. That in mind, I come to you with a slightly different argument: No matter who’s in charge, there’s no salvaging Microsoft or Xbox. The entire enterprise is rotten to the core.
Even if we keep our focus squarely on games, we’re talking about a behemoth that chose to scoop up a mindbogglingly large chunk of fertile game development soil. Recent standouts include the entirety of Activision Blizzard (an operation spanning well over 20 studios), all of Zenimax/Bethesda (which includes subsidiaries like id Software and Arkane), Double Fine, Obsidian, and inXile – all with no apparent long-term plan beyond digging a very deep hole. The story of Microsoft’s tenuous grip on third place has not been the games; instead, it’s one of cuts and closures.
OK, that’s not entirely fair. Microsoft did sort of have a plan: Game Pass, a subscription service that was supposed to become the Netflix of games, but which so far has yet to transform the gaming landscape the way the latter did for TV and film. What if it did, though? What was the long-term play? Arkane founder (and current WolfEye Studios creative director) Raphael Colantonio recently summed it up by declaring the whole enterprise “unsustainable,” echoing a sentiment shared by many in the industry for years.
"I think Game Pass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by [Microsoft's] ‘infinite money,’ but at some point reality has to hit," he wrote on Twitter. “I don’t think GP can co-exist with other models; they’ll either kill everyone else or give up.”
Microsoft has proven hesitant to publicly admit what common sense would infer to be true: Games included in a relatively cheap – though increasingly expensive – subscription package sell less. Microsoft, meanwhile, insists that Game Pass is at least profitable on its own terms, but Colantonio believes otherwise.
"Game Pass is only [profitable] if you ignore the 100 billions that MS spent in acquiring content for GP such as Zenimax and Activision," he wrote.
The Game Business’ Chris Dring added another layer to this dynamic: “I asked for clarification on the 'Game Pass is profitable' claim, and was told no first-party costs are included,” he wrote on Twitter. “What they don’t count is the lost revenue that Xbox’s first-party studios are seeing as a result of the service. I have to imagine if first-party studios received similar compensation [to third-party studios on Game Pass], that profitability might not be correct.”
All of which is to say: Outside of funding indies – money that might be drying up – Microsoft’s presence has in the long run proven actively detrimental to what remains of the video game industry, in some ways by design. As massive mega-corporations are wont to do, it viewed games as a spigot from which to fill its buckets with capital. The drought it left in its wake – closed studios, laid off employees, a dearth of future opportunities, and a less functional approach to game sales – would be none of its concern. And what do we have to show for it? A first-party slate that, outside of gems like Avowed, is more defined by misses (Crackdown 3), curious absences (Fable), and cancellations (Scalebound, Everwild, Perfect Dark) than anything resembling hits.
There’s just no reason to support Microsoft’s gaming endeavors at this point. It’s had plenty of time to get things right; it’s not going to. The company’s other endeavors aren’t looking great, either. I’m not saying you’ve got to uninstall Windows right this second, but there’s a wider, better world out there than the misanthropic product universe Microsoft would very much like us all to remain confined to. The best time to start divesting from Microsoft was years ago, or when its products first began sustaining Israel’s endless assault on Palestinians, or yesterday. The second best time is now.
