Sure Seems Like Xbox Is Cooked

Since she first took up the mantle left behind by Phil Spencer earlier this year, new Xbox head Asha Sharma has been on a charm offensive, lowering the price of Game Pass, killing needless AI features, and generally advocating for a back-to-the-basics approach. But it was an illusion all along. Last week, the company was handing out free consoles at Summer Game Fest in a display of opulence meant to suggest renewed brand strength; this week, news broke that another “significant” round of layoffs is just around the corner, with Sharma publishing a letter to employees about how Xbox’s current course “cannot continue.” On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about how Microsoft ended up here—and why things aren’t likely to improve soon, if ever.

This time around, we’re joined by Ethan Gach of noted Aftermath origin story Kotaku dot com to discuss… well, originally we were gonna talk about Summer Game Fest, but then—moments before we began recording—news broke that Xbox is on the verge of yet another devastating round of layoffs. We find ourselves once again lamenting the irreparable damage Microsoft has done to the video game industry, made all the more puzzling by the fact that the company seemed intent on acting like it was doing an about face following the appointment of Sharma as Xbox’s new head. But now here we are, a scant few months later.

Then we move on to the games industry party that preceded this week’s ice-cold bucket of water: Summer Game Fest. Ethan, who was in attendance, gives us his appraisal of Geoff’s latest carnival. The verdict: There were some cool games, and the whole thing left people with the mistaken impression that the industry can be normal and functional. But overall, the event was light on surprises. Finally, we nearly drop the ball on the mailbag, but readers swoop in to save us from a terrible fate.

You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, leave a review so that we can hire someone whose sole job it will be to remind us to perform crucial podcast-related tasks (that we’ve already been doing for over 100 episodes, yet somehow managed to forget).

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):

Luke: Xbox at least had some kind of brand and stood for something for a good 6-8 years over two consoles where it had a roster of first-party games, it had a succession of series that people [cared about]. Just like Nintendo and PlayStation, you could get this on Xbox.

And you could tell, as soon as the Xbox One came around—and they started doing all the TV and multimedia bullshit, and they shut down all those studios or canceled a bunch of games; no more Fable, no more proper Gears of War games, Bungie stopped making Halo—[Xbox] began this stripping away of things that usually make a console great and give it a lasting place in the marketplace. They were stripping it for parts and mismanaging it at the launch of the Xbox One.

Everything that’s come after that has just made it worse. So I don’t know if you can bring someone in to right the ship, because I don’t think anyone knows where the ship even is anymore. It’s drifted so far from its original goal, and it’s had a succession of people who clearly have no idea how to position this company or where it lands in the marketplace versus its competitors; it’s almost impossible to look at them and say, “OK, this decision you’re making now might fix it.” Because it’s like, could you patch the Titanic when it was halfway down? No, that was sunk the second it hit the iceberg. There’s nothing you can do. You can play a finite number of songs.

Nathan: You can rearrange some deck chairs.

Luke: But it will eventually go down, because you’re not recovering from hitting the iceberg in the first place.

Nathan: The one upside to any of this is that, if you’re someone who’s been wanting to boycott Microsoft on the grounds of BDS-related sanctions and things like that, it’s never been easier. Because there’s just really not much motion happening on the Xbox side of things, and there probably won’t be.

Funnily enough, Rock Paper Shotgun ran a piece before all this layoff news came out titled “There's never been an easier time to boycott Microsoft, the most boring video game publisher in the business.” They wrote:

There is often an air of learned helplessness, a kind of deer-in-headlights mentality. Microsoft's gaming biz is too huge to ignore. They own so much. They own a lot of the malarkey that gets eyeballs. Which I can confirm, based on day-to-day experience of traffic stats. Still, I would argue that they do not have any momentum with the things they own, and to be frank, a fair whack of their stuff does sod-all traffic for us. Microsoft today are institutionally incapable of being intriguing. As such, an extremely indulgent way of thinking about the BDS boycott is to treat it as positive encouragement to seek intrigue elsewhere.

Which I think is true. People are constantly talking about how many interesting games are out right now and how they don’t have time for all of them—and how September is gonna be a minefield. It’s like, just scrape all the Microsoft stuff off your plate. That’ll help, at least a little bit.