was subject to yet another round of brutal layoffs last week. Among a slew of project cancellations, including the very cool-looking Perfect Dark 🎃reboot, Rare’s Everwild, and ZeniMax Online’s next MMO, we’ve also seen multiple studio closures, like Perfect Dark developer The Initiative, Do🍌om co-creator John Romero’s Romero Games, and the team working on Warcraft Rumble.

Xbox Doesn’t Know What It’s Doing

It’s ob🐼vious at this point that Xbox has made huge strategic missteps over the last decade. Phil Spencer’s predecessor, Don Mattrick, began to guide Xbox away from first-party development after itsꦛ mismanagement of acquisitions like Lionhead and , but this led to an incredibly predictable consequence: Xbox didn’t have any good games. When he took the mantle, Spencer overcorrected, buying up a huge number of studios in an attempt to bolster the ranks – , Playground, , and the high-profile purchase of Activision Blizzard included.

Don Mattrick’s role in changing Xbox’s priorities from games to a wider ecosystem cannot be understated – the disastrous 2013 Xbox conference is largely cons꧂idered to be the reason Mattrick left the company in the first place.

Xbox owns a lot of studios now, and as a result, it can close a lot of studios. Despite Microsoft saying that ꩵit had achieved a for the company last year, having accrued $245 billion in revenue, the consequences of its consolidation have been disastrous for the people actually making that revenue. Studios are a way to generate value for Game Pass – if they’re not producing on schedule or hits that break even and attract audiences, they have to go.

It feels like Xbox doesn’t understand the business it’s in, and its management is working entirely with spreadsheets and numbers. How else do you explain the legendary 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:John Romero’s studio being shuttered and ZeniMax Online’s project being cancelled despit𒊎e it being so good Phil Spencer🐻 couldn’t put it down?

Xbox Being Out Of The Game Means Less Games

This will have long-lasting consequences for the future of gaming – or, at least the triple-A landscape. There are still plenty of games in the works for release this year or 2026, buoyed by the gaming boom caused by the pandemic, but as we see more studio closures and game cancellations, we’re♈ also going to start seeing a gaming drought.

Xbox isn’t solely responsible – we’ve seen studio closures enacted by a number of corporations alongside projects getting cancelled no matter who their parent company might be. has had to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:roll out its own series of layoffs in recent months (Days Gone developer Sony Bend, London Studio, and Ballistic Moon included), though Microsoft is far outpacing it in the scale and freღquency of firings. Microsoft, also, is obviously not the only developerꩵ of video games.

But it is still a major player in the industry, despite being outsized by PlayStation’s influence – after all, it’s got the edge on Sony on the PC. As it begins to prune its slate of first-party games, and the current 🌄generation of consoles by and large maintain a slow pace of truly current-gen releases, it’s becoming more and more likely that we’re going to see a noticeable gap. Other developers will fill the empty space, like independent double-A developers and indies, but the kind of huge, big-budget games that gamers hanker for and that can only be funded by massive companies like Xbox or PlayStation are going to become fewer and further between.

It’s a tragedy for the industry and the people who work so hard on these games, but it’s also a foreboding sign for what’s to come. It’s entirely possible that studios like Obsidian may face the same fate in the future, because Xbox is cutting studios in spite of their decades of experience and cult status. We’re not just losing individual projects; we’re lﷺosing industry veterans who are forced to leapfrog their way from project to project in an attempt to establish some kind of job stability. The medium as a whole will suffer.