On Wednesday, Xbox posted to social media about its planned attendance at Gamescom in August, hyping up visitors to “Be among the first to play what’s next - including the Gears of War: E-Day campaign.” It’s really not the time.
Xbox recently announced a “reset” that seems certain to involve layoffs on a mass scale. Studios like Double Fine, Compulsion Games, and Ninja Theory are reportedly in discussions to try to save themselves from closure. It’s particularly awkward in Ninja Theory’s case, where the studio announced a third Hellblade game, Senua, at Xbox’s Summer Game Fest showcase, just days before Xbox released the memo about its big changes. According to Stephen Totilo at GameFile, Xbox knew Ninja Theory was on the chopping block as the trailer played, reporting
The thinking was that the promise of a newly announced game would help draw investor interest in the studio, a source familiar with Microsoft’s plans told Game File (it’s unclear if anyone atop Ninja Theory was involved in this plan).
Summer Game Fest attendees have already highlighted the clash between Xbox’s showy event presence, where the company doled out free consoles and other swag, and its subsequent wordy-yet-vague pronouncements about the dire straits the business is in. Gamescom will happen after whatever the company plans to do–while we don’t know how that will look yet, it’s sure to cast a pall on the Gamescom show. Announcing the whole thing like it’s any other day while news of potential studio closures is very fresh on everyone’s minds, and while the workers who make the games Xbox wants to hype to fans are surely worried about their own jobs and those of their colleagues, not only makes the company look either cruel or stupid, but makes it look like it thinks the fans it’s talking to are cruel or stupid as well.
I can get that the company can’t just cancel an appearance at one of the biggest gaming events in the world. If the purpose of this reset in executives’ minds is to create a stronger company, that company needs to go out and show that it’s stronger afterward. It would be bad for business to sit in mourning over decisions the company itself made for whatever justifications and strategy it’s telling itself. It needs to show the fans at its fest that what it’s doing is working, that the destruction it’s going to wreak is good for both the company and its fans.
CEO Asha Sharma has been making an effort to appeal to those fans, or whatever her conception of the ideal Xbox player is: rebranding the company to “XBOX” after a Twitter poll (as well as changing the entire name to “Xbox” from “Microsoft Gaming,” along with its logo), lowering the price of Game Pass, and doing away with the company’s unpopular “This Is An Xbox” campaign. She’s active on social media, frequently replying to blue check Twitter users. So it makes sense for her image, and the image the company is trying to portray, to full steam ahead with a FanFest at Gamescom, making a show of putting these “fans” first, even as layoffs loom.
But hyping the whole thing now isn’t necessary unless Xbox hopes it can bulldoze through it all, that “fans” will be too dazzled by the chance to play a new Gears of War to reflect on the question of what Xbox will be by the time they have that controller in their hands. Maybe the people Xbox is talking to with these posts don’t know or don’t care about the situation workers at the company are facing; maybe Xbox thinks they only care about their games, about the hype for Project Helix, about a renewed “XBOX” that’s all about them.
On Twitter, those fans seem pretty hyped, while the response on Bluesky is more skeptical. I feel for whatever social media managers are triaging the fallout of these posts while surely being worried about their own jobs and those of their peers. But just as players have done with BDS’ boycott against Microsoft, the audience for this announcement can keep people in their minds over products, refusing to let a shiny new game distract them from the human cost of the company’s decisions, and holding executives at Xbox to account for the consequences.
