Resetting XBOX - Compulsion Games and Double Fine to go indie again, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs "to join new ownership"

Boycott Xbox

It's pretty easy to do when they don't want to own studios that make games anymore.

Best possible outcome for those studios at least. Whether all the other changes have any positive impact, I guess we'll see. I'm not too hopeful though.

They should make mojang indie again.
And make id tech independent.

Resetting Xbox? Wasn’t that a cool trick in like the Morrowind days, cmon guys, you pedophile defending scumbags need to come up with some new fucking material

At this point I don't know what Microsoft has been doing lately that isn't about laying off thousands of people, but at least I'm very happy that all these companies have been spun out of Xbox. Double Fine might not be a 10/10 studio, but it's great that they're indie again and not part of a bipolar company that keeps threatening every company they own with layoffs due to management's bad decisions.

In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me.

I appreciate how direct this post is compared to your average corpo-speak, but wow that sounds threatening as hell LOL.

Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. [...] We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3.

14 layers of management is insane. Isn't that like a month of going up and down the chain for simple decisions? No wonder they take forever making one game that turns out to be mediocre.

There's a lot of talk about focusing on their bigger projects and being more hands-on with studios, which is worrying. Usually management messing with development makes the game worse.

Never believe executive speak. I had a CFO claim to a large group of people that they were canceling the "free transit" passes once because someone used it 16 times in one day.

The passes dont even allow that due to a 2 hour grace period, nor would that be a good justification to screw over 2000 people with bus passes anyway, but it sure sounded like an outrageous abuse of the companies generosity, so thats the lie they told to justify it.

The reality is that it saved the company more than 100k/year, and the CFO was canceling any program that they didn't personally benefit from that met that criteria.

"The next decade of gaming will be larger, more global [...]"

I'm positive this is just austerity measures after folding in activision. They're probably finding more and more ways to offshore american and western european jobs to poorer nations where they can pay the employees less $$$.

Money is the only motivation. It's not about producing better art, just more profits.

Not much left to boycott. Just don’t subscribe to Gamepass and that cuts off their only actual revenue stream left lmao.

https://nogamesforgenocide.com/

Please boycott XBOX for genocide at least. Everyone who bought Forza Horizon supported this

I cannot think of a less successful publisher than Microsoft. A wealth of titles and talent and they squandered entirely, cancelled everything that probably didn’t meet imaginary revenue targets and sent thousands of people to the street. They literally can’t release a fucking game to save their shitty subscription service. And now more get sent out to save money for their bullshit AI nonsense.

This is all MSFT spin.

The studios mentioned don't all have enough funding to continue to be operational at their current burn rates. Those studios will be doing their own layoffs or may not survive at all.

Those studios account for under 30% of the 1600 jobs that MSFT is removing from their payroll today. As the day goes on there will be news that breaks of other studios under their banner that have layoffs which contribute to the total mentioned. It's likely that their individual stories will be lost under this initial announcement.

Probably needed considering how mediocre they've done this generation, but ouch. Also, I guess this means game pass didn't pan out as a bet

Don't most cities sell monthly unlimited use bus passes? I don't know why you wouldn't just issue those