Xbox Has Flatlined
I have considered myself something of a gamer for most of my life. It began with my first console that my parents bought me, which was the NES. I lost so many hours to that console with a handful of games that I would have. It began a lifelong fandom of many franchises such as Mega Man and Metroid. I’ve had almost every console but a scant few that apparently no one else bought either like the TurboGrafx or the Saturn.
The ones I’ve had also include the Xbox. I’ve had them all at some point. And it wasn’t until about 2 years ago that it felt like the people in charge got together in a conference room in the C-Suite and had a clandestine meeting that may have gone something like this.
“We’ve had some good success and bad decisions over the last few years. And I really feel like we haven’t made enough bad decisions.”
“You know, I was thinking the same thing. We haven’t shot ourselves in the foot nearly enough lately, and I’m kinda missing those days.”
“Don’t you worry. I have an idea that is sure to put us right back behind that 8 ball. Follow me on this. The campaign? Everything is a Xbox.”
And so it began. Under the guidance of Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond would come up with that brilliant chestnut of an idea that everything is a Xbox. She would soon find out that when players think everything is a Xbox, they don’t want to spend money on a Xbox. Maybe Sarah was in that clandestine meeting? What’s funny is she was still highly praised because of her ability to get those big deals across the line. Well she got this big deal in the doghouse. And then poof, she was gone! Phil had the good sense to hit the exit too.
Then enter Asha Sharma, the current CEO of Xbox. Before this gig per her LinkedIn profile, she was President of CoreAI at Microsoft. Before that, she was the COO of Instacart. You know the grocery delivery company? Surely you can see all the parallels between making sure someone gets fresh bananas and selling video games and consoles. It’s practically a story as old as time itself.
So what does she do? Well she jacks up the price of GamePass Ultimate, which is their subscription service that lets you play many titles from both Microsoft and some of its publishers. It was quite a significant price increase too, all despite the fact the console sales were falling off a cliff. Because if I’m going to gouge my customers, I’m going to do it when its profits are in freefall. That's some big brain thinking right there. Of course, she’d also retcon that and roll the price back, but not before taking away a little something.
We also can’t ignore the three different price increases for the console. I won’t lay this blame at her feet. We all know the memory market is begging for someone to regulate them or at least sue them for a huge sum, both of which are on the table currently as I write this. It’s the first time in the history of gaming that a current gen console got more expensive after it was released.
But when she agreed to roll back that GamePass subscription price, she began to engender some good vibes with the player base. But we can’t have that at Microsoft. That longing to shoot themselves in the foot again started cramping up, prompting them to have one of the biggest firing sprees in gaming history with over 3,200 developers given the pink slip. I have full confidence those developers will find new jobs if they haven’t already, and I wish them nothing but success.
But now we need to do a little damage control, which as it turns out, has the opposite effect because this is Microsoft we’re talking about. What follows is a corpo-speak (and possibly edited by Copilot) letter to the survivors of the Xbox bloodbath. There’s gonna be some reshuffling. There’s gonna be some reduction of management, and they’re going to reset Xbox. Well that all sounds great except I think the horse has left the barn. The interest in Xbox has managed to drive itself further into the center of the Earth because of some piss poor decision making that only the people underneath suffered from when it all comes to a head.
To be fair, stupid decision making isn’t something Xbox cornered the market on of late. Look at Sony’s decision to end physical media for PlayStation while still printing vinyl records and CDs, which are less profitable for them than video games. But Xbox is the frontrunner because they seem hellbent on digging the hole deeper and deeper for themselves.
You know what? I applaud them for that. I really do. It takes a lot of drive to find new and worse ways to make your fanbase despise you and not want anything to do with you. But the braintrust over at Xbox have lived up to the “hold my beer” meme with aplomb. Well done to them. That took some real hindsight. Hind because that’s where the braintrust is located, I feel.
So what we have now is a game landscape getting worse by the day, largely due to the memory shortage as well as simply bad decision making stacked up to eye level and mounting. I’m of the mind that Sharma is going to administer palliative care to the Xbox brand before Microsoft ends up selling it off ultimately to whoever likes to collect severely damaged IP. Maybe the GameStop CEO can buy it since that whole eBay thing didn’t quite pan out.
So here’s to you, Xbox. It took a long time for me to see a multibillion dollar corporation try to drive themselves off a cliff, but you really hit the gas.
May the impact be even more impressive.
