Asmongold TV - is Xbox cooked? | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

is Xbox cooked? Asmongold podcast for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. ---------- Keywords: game reviews, esports commentary, gaming opinions, gaming community, gaming drama, gaming podcast, twitch streamer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Xbox is, um, I don't even know what the hell's going on with Xbox. But it's not good. I'll tell you that. It's not good at all. Xbox isn't floating. Let's watch it. The as of now, not so jolly green giant Microsoft Xbox just pinks up about 9,000 people, July 2nd, 2025. They axed the long, teased, perfect dark reboot, shuddered the initiative, and quietly nudged to Rares decade in the making. ever wild into an unmarked grave they've been digging for god.

Looks like garbage. That's what I think. Looks like shit. It is unfortunately the bigger and better sequel to last year's carnage when Xbox decided that high fire rush their massive hit was warranting of closing the studio and Redfall was red. Why does everybody think that HiFi Rush was this massive hit? Do you really think that they would have shut down the studio if they had made money on the game?

It sold well? How do you know that? Nobody has access to the booking that they have. Nobody knows that. There was nothing that really could have been done about forcing a studio that makes immersive Sims to make a stupid live service heap of vampire nonsense. This is, again, I think, a total, total, total excuse. It doesn't matter what video game you make. If you can't figure out how to make characters not clip through the floor, you're a bad game dev.

Period. Redfall was, like, I think you'd have a good argument if the game didn't have a lot of direction, but it played well. But this game didn't even play well. The game was garbage. The studio deserved to be shut down because they made trash. Everything about this game was bad. The gameplay was bad, the graphics were bad, the game was full of bugs. Why would that happen?

I'll take sorry, dishonored is goaded. You don't understand the way that these studios run. These studios, in a lot of cases, are the ship of Theseus. The only thing that is the same with these studios, whenever you're comparing them to how they used to be, or the development that they used to have, is the name of the studio. That's it. The people are different. The management are different. The creative is different.

The process is different. Everything is different. You cannot base the quality of a studio off of a game that came out 10 years ago. It's just not how it works. Look at Bungee. Yeah. Look at Blizzard. How many ship of Theseus developers do we have now?

We're probably going to have that with Naughty Dog with Intergalactic 2. not forcing them to do that and then complaining when it doesn't work. I mean, that was kind of a built-in ZenMX problem, but still, nothing says we believe in the power of our studios like closing them while Phil Spencer. They should close them. They made garbage.

That's the way it works. If you produce a product, then the product doesn't sell and you lose millions of dollars, you get fired. He's not retiring anytime soon. The new Xbox straight. He looks a lot like if you can't beat them publish on their platform. High-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Pentamette, they're all sailing on to Sony's turf,

and Hellblade 2 is hot on their heels. Meanwhile, Game Pass has stalled at their 35 million subscribers. Not a number to shake a stick at, but it hasn't been growing and it's needed to grow. So Microsoft decided. Who decided that it needed to grow? Did Microsoft say that? What are they thinking internally? The difference between PlayStation and Xbox is that PlayStation exists inside of a relatively small ecosystem,

whereas Xbox exists inside of an ecosystem that compromises 90% of the PCs used worldwide with Windows. It's kind of like people wonder, oh, why is it that Amazon doesn't care about Twitch losing money? It's because Twitch acts as a loss leader and it introduces and it's integrated into, the Amazon ecosystem in the same way that Xbox is integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem. So if you take individual loss leaders or individual products and you judge them by themselves, they might not make a lot of sense financially, but when you evaluate them inside of the scope of the larger system that they're a part of, they actually play an integral role. You know what? Let's start partnering with people to make third party handhelds.

Oh, and they won't play the entire Xbox. catalog, just PC games that you don't need Xbox for. Yeah, a lot of head scratching going on. This is a long intro, but in order to set it up, there's a lot to say. It feels like we've been asking this question a lot, but, uh, well, hi folks, it's Falcon and today on GameRanks. We are, again, perhaps more fervently and more seriously asking the question, what the hell is going on with Xbox?

I think Xbox, this is what in my opinion the problem is. I think Xbox doesn't hold their developers to a high enough standard. How the fuck do you have, like, what is the main game that Xbox is associated with? What is the game that put Xbox on the map? Halo. Everybody knows it. How the fuck have you not fired every single person from 343 and replaced them with literally anyone else? Halo 4 was a disappointment?

Halo 5 was a disappointment, and Halo Infinite is currently a failure. How do you have three strikes, and the only thing you do is rename the studio? They should have completely, they should have disbanded 343 after Halo 5. You had two chances, you failed. Reboot the entire thing, yeah.

And I think that's the big problem that Xbox has, is that Xbox is spread probably too thin and they're not focusing on a handful of really, really strong good titles, which is what I think PlayStation does very well. They focus on narrowing down and doing a few very good single-player experience titles like Death Stranding 2, like God of War, like Final Fantasy 16 when it originally came out, and that is what they do. They're narrow in focus, and because of that, they're able to be effective.

So the last year hasn't been kind to the Xbox brand with the whole Xbox Everywhere initiative and the many concerning rumors that we've been... This is short-sighted. Xbox Everywhere will be the norm. Xbox is setting themselves up to be a major player in cloud gaming, and people that don't see that, I don't think they realize what the future is going to be. Xbox and Microsoft, and more importantly, Microsoft is setting themselves up to be a cloud gaming competitor. Whereas PlayStation is still selling consoles at a loss. Did you guys know that a lot of consoles are sold at a loss in order to, you know, hopefully sell video games that are sold at a higher margin?

So why would Xbox fixate on selling a product and a piece of technology that is effectively something they're losing money on anyway? It's not even a good, it's like if you go down to the fundamental level, why would Xbox want to keep making, why would they want to? why would they want to keep making Xbox consoles if the consoles lose money and they could just sell the same product on a different place?

It doesn't make any sense. Coming out of Microsoft regarding the future of Xbox hardware, but it seemed like things were kind of on the upswing after Xbox strong showing at Summer Game Fest. That positivity has all but evaporated with the devastating news from yesterday I mentioned at the top,

you know, over 9,000. 9,000. Yes, over 9,000 people employed Xbox have been laid off. And Microsoft, could you have at least not done the meme? I don't want to laugh about a bunch of people losing their jobs. The multiple studios have been closed for good, some highly anticipated. They're not highly anticipated. The shit sucked. It's slop. It's garbage. You think Phil Spencer's retarded?

He's not retarded. This game sucks. Games have been canceled. Cuts and layoffs are hitting everywhere. Even successful areas like turn 10 and even studios working on freaking call of duty. Good. Call of duty has a quality problem for years.

It's even established that every third call of duty is like bad. Because they keep pushing them out at this super high ratio and the quality of the games goes down. Like I heard the new Black Ops is pretty good. Before that, I feel like the last one that was really important was Warzone. Sure, it's only every third one? Yeah, because there are three studios that make Call of Duty, right? It's mid.

I'm telling you, bro, like, they've got to do that 9-11 plot. They have to do it. I don't know why they haven't done it. Here's that nothing and no one is safe in this major round of firings. Keep in mind, we're talking about the fourth major wave of firing in the last two years. Ever since acquiring Activision Blizzard, it has just been a bloodbath for all involved. This latest thing is a step beyond, though. It's not just support staff or QA or redundant management or whatever excuse they came up with for the last ones.

This time, Xbox is coming for your job, whether you're in a studio trapped in development hell, or in one of their best studios with hits coming out of it. In late June, we actually heard rumblings about potential mass calling of jobs here. And this is not the mass culling. This is the appetizer. On the 2nd of July, the hammer came down. It wasn't just Xbox. It was all of Microsoft. It's about 4% of the entire Microsoft workforce.

Oh, yeah. To be clear, insane. The initiative, the studio formed to work on the perfect dark reboot, was entirely... How the fuck? Do 30 people make Expedition 33? But 9,000 people get let go. and the games are still garbage. And I'll tell you how.

So because their jobs are useless and they make garbage. Get the losers out. Remove the losers. Remove the bloat. Remove the middle management. Remove the HR. Bring in passion, talent, and drive.

And you can do the same thing with 10 people that it would take 100 Karens to fail at. Leave shut down. The perfect dark reboot has been canceled. Of course it was. Everybody thought this bitch looked ugly as fuck. Everybody thought this was awful.

There's a huge controversy about this. When was the last time they made a game and there was an ugly female character? And the game did well. Oh, that's right. Probably fucking never. Or there's some game in the PlayStation 3 that had happened in. That's it.

Never. It doesn't work that way. Who the fuck? fuck do you think plays games where you run around and shoot people? Men. Do you think men want to play some character that looks like their mom? No. They want to play a girl that looks like Eve from

Stellar Blade. It's that simple. Nobody asked for this. Nobody wants this. Nobody needs this and it won't sell. That's it. Rare's Everwild as well. I'm sorry. According to insider sources, the cancellation of Everwild is

actually leading to the game's director Greg Mayles, a 35-year veteran of Rare, who worked on games as far back as Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Cazui, and Viva Penaata, bolting. Just like, I'm, if you're doing this, I'm caught. I'm out. I'm out, guys. I mean, this is just one person among thousands, but I wanted to highlight him because he's an elder statesman to the games industry. And males exit from Rare is one of the last nails in the coffin classic Rare. Almost all of the old guard from that studio are just gone. Ship Athesias. Like what I said. It's tough time to be a rare fan.

right now. Honestly, but in all serious, it's not just... People have to stop being fans of development studios that made a good game 27 years ago. That's not the same studio. Those aren't the same people. Just because there's a couple of people that are there that are the same, I bet 90% of that studio staff is different.

It's so delusional. It's everything, Xbox. Even King, the mobile game developer and massive moneymaker for Xbox is getting like 10% of its studio cut. Raven Software and Sledgehammer are getting hit with some layoffs. A new IP that was going to be a new MMO from the Elders Grove online guys canceled. And that's far. Did we see it? No. I wonder why.

From the only thing getting canned at Bethesda, reportedly there are multiple unannounced projects that have been canceled. Even John Romero, the influential co-creator of Doom, was not spared Xbox's. well I guess you could say wrath but I don't think this is wrath as somebody who loves video games these job losses are brutal and hearing about all these

potentially amazing games getting canceled before they're not brutal they're necessary in order to have a tree grow in the way that you want it to it needs to have branches pruned this is necessary I think that a lot of people like it's very popular

to say what I think that this video is saying and it's very unpopular to say what I'm saying. But if you look at the results and the outcomes, the people that follow my line of thinking are the ones that create the best positive outcomes. It's super disheartening. I'm not really a console-warst person.

I like me some PlayStation. I like me some Nintendo Switch. And I like me some Xbox. But as such, I am an Xbox fan. And it's hard not to feel like the sky is falling after all this news. So what does Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft gaming. Do?

Why put out a tone-deaf internal message that sounds more like a press release for shareholders than anything meant to address concerns or help with what is, I mean, an absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel morale situation? It's great to see you lost weight, but the other reason, too, also is, here's probably the main reason why.

It's because it was for shareholders. They can't share internal emails because they always get leaked. So the only things that they share with employees privately are things that they expect to go public. That's the reason why. I feel like a lot of the people that made decisions to make all this vote won't get affected by this. I think that you're right. And you need to see more executive leadership get sacked as well.

That's true. No doubt. This entire statement is so, so freaking pathetic. It is pure corporal garbage. It's partially Phil's fault for not being on hands on with the devs. I think you bring up a really great point because at the end of the day, Phil is the head of Xbox, and another woman Sarah is also the head of Xbox. When they have a game that comes out, it is ultimately their responsibility that that game is good.

And so I think that you bring up a really good point. And I think that they are spread way too thin. They need to narrow down, in my opinion, they need to make a new Conquer's Bad Fur Day. They need to make a good Halo. They need to make sure Gears of War E-Day is good. And let me think, there's probably two other games that they really need to narrow down and make. And it's mainly Halo and Gears. Those are the big ones.

And Fable. Yes, exactly. Fable is the other one. Fable and Elder Scroll 6. If they could, like, just take everything else and get rid of it. Deliver on those five products. And Xbox is the pinnacle. That's it.

inexplicably acknowledges all the job losses. Well, at the same time saying, I recognize that these changes come at a time when we have more players, games and gaming hours than ever before. Our platform, hardware, and game roadmap has never looked stronger. What the fuck is wrong with you, Phil? I'm sorry to curse, but what is that? What is that?

Well, he's saying that for shareholders because he knows that they're going to leak the message. and if he says that we're losing players, it's going to affect the shareholder value. And that's the reason why. So you shouldn't criticize Phil for making statements like this that are hollow. You should look at why they're happening.

And the reason why they're happening is because people leak content and they say that they expose things that are meant to be private. And so because of that, he can't communicate with them on an honest level because they're just going to leak it. That's the reason why.

It's PR speech. exactly. Tell you what it is. He's trying to call them investors while addressing the issue for remaining staff. He just comes off as fake as shit. We've all been willing to give Phil a shot

the last few years because things have been tough. I'm not going to pretend that things are not tough. It's getting harder and harder for anybody out there in them streets. In my opinion, the graphics on this, I don't think this is good enough. I think this is okay. But this isn't that much better

than Halo 3. And also this is still the Molinaer armor. So it should be way more tattered up. It should be way more like it looks plastic. It does. This is your flagship franchise. If Halo is not your most popular product, you're fucking up. Gameplay is over graphics?

No, but the graphics should still be really good. You don't remember the way it used to be. Halo 1's graphics were like the equivalent of Blackmith Wukong, beyond that even. Halo 1, Final Fantasy 10, Super Mario 64, Super Mario RPG, I can think of The Witcher 3, Monster Hunter World. Like, these are games that were so definitive in terms of graphics and style that, they move the entire industry forward. And in its own unique way, Legend of Zelda,

The Wind Waker was also like that. But that was inspired by Beautiful Joe, which came before that too. But ultimately, this should be a lot better. But it's also getting harder and harder to see his run as the leader of Xbox as a freaking disaster.

Going from the top of the industry to what is essentially a third-party publisher in just over a decade is something basically only Sega can truly identify with. Like the Genesis was just, I mean, it did what Nintendo. And the Xbox 360, yeah, it had some pretty big problems to overcome. But they did right by consumers and that built the brand in a massive way.

It's arguable that the Nintendo Wii won in terms of pure sales, but culturally speaking. The Wii is the most transcendent console of all time. The Xbox was the winner, right? Yeah. Now a lot of homegrown Xbox franchises dead in the water, floundering badly. is entirely propped up by their third-party purchases of Bethesda and Activision

and even then it seems like at least right now, the purchase of these massive studios is hurting them more than it's helping Xbox. Like, look at how many cuts are being targeted at Bethesda and Activision. It's just Microsoft stuff here. It's across the board,

Gaming Division and stuff. With how things are going at Microsoft, along with all the reports we're hearing at EA and jobs getting cut there... They've canceled the Black Panther game? Everybody talks about why this is so horrible that they canceled these games,

but we haven't even seen the games. We didn't even see the games. How do we know that this was a bad decision? It's hard not to feel like the bottom is falling out. The people that made Black Panther, one of the women that was running the game, said that she didn't want to work with white people because they made her, like,

she couldn't communicate or talk to white people in the right way. You really think that people like that are going to be able to create a good product? Probably not. They're retarded. The U.S. games industry. If this really is the beginning of the end of the U.S. dominating video games, it's at least partially a self-inflicted wound, fueled by reckless consolidation and tech industry greed, buying up everything they can without actually understanding why people buy video games. It's honestly completely infuriating, but it's the narrative that's being built. It's not just a U.S. games industry, honestly. There's reports that

Video game spending is just down across the board. I think the reason why video game spending is going down is because there's so many free games that are available that people play regularly, things like Fortnite, for example. And so as you've seen that transition happen, and also another big reason is because 18 to 24 year olds have less disposable income. So like if you're comparing this to COVID, like what are you comparing it to 2021? It's very well documented that during recessionary periods that like luxury purchases actually go up. A lot of this is just not, it's not contextualized in a way that I think is accurate. New games are micro-transaction trash. Yeah, markets oversaturated.

They play gotcha games now. Well, I mean, I think that would be included, right? COVID, all these companies bet on infinite growth. But hey, remember how we were all stuck indoors and the best thing to do with that situation? Play video games. And now we aren't all stuck indoors anymore. Oh, there's a shock. With these people thinking that the disease was going to keep us inside.

Like that wasn't the new normal. It was an aberration in human history. That's not how human history works. I know people like 28 years later, but that wouldn't happen, man. I haven't seen it yet. I heard it was good. aspect of it, but like, they die out. The zombies start. They can't think. They just do rage shit. And eventually you run out of energy. That's how diseases work. They become less as a spread

antipot. We don't need to get into it. I just can't fathom the reaction from all these companies that because we're in a pandemic and we're locked down and everybody's playing video games, that that's how it's always going to be. I just can't fathom. He's right. But I think that his perspective is also short-sighted. Because if you look at a lot of the company's growth patterns from before and after COVID, many companies retained 40 to 60% of their COVID numbers. So I'll give you a couple of examples just to kind of prove this. We're going to look at Twitch Tracker, right? And this just shows statistics for Twitch. You can see that as COVID was a massive multiplier on the popularity of Twitch, after COVID ended,

they maintained a lot of that popularity afterwards. You can look at, let me think of another, are there more examples, Steam users? So let's take a look at that over here, and we'll see if there's a graph also. And you can see right here, you can see obviously COVID was a massive amount of people coming into the demographic,

but it continued to maintain. So this entire idea that the COVID levels of success were not at least partially maintained is untrue. Now, obviously, it didn't just continue the line going up straight up. Absolutely not. But the reality is that with a lot of these companies, they did retain a tremendous amount of the people that they brought into their ecosystem.

SteamDB has a better graph. Let me see if I can pull that up and find it real quick. Charts, maybe? Can I just find it through charts? Concurrent Steam users. Okay. Let me see if I can show this right here. So concurrent Steam users over the last eight years.

And you can see right here, this clearly, yeah, this is a great graph. After the nine years. So this is COVID-19, right? And you can see that Steam is even going up after that. So Netflix as well. Yeah, you can look at Netflix as well also. So, but maintaining that growth is no longer growth. Yeah, exactly, right?

There's no set of information that implies that. And yet, And the younger generation is literally getting priced out of their own hobby. Games that casual audiences might actually want, like Perfect Dark, they're not getting made. And Halo is not out of the woods. Who even knows what's going on with 343 right now? Well, the thing, the fact that 343 aren't in the unemployment line right now is an insult to Halo players. It's a complete insult.

Like, they've failed three games so far. three games they've released with the largest IP in Xbox history, and they failed. Like, why are they not at McDonald's? They should be at McDonald's. Did anybody want or ask for Perfect Dark? I think that if they remade Perfect Dark, Jet Force Gemini, Conquers Bad Fur Day,

or, like, one of these, like, older video games, like, the, what was it, the, um, the odd, odd, Odyssey or whatever, Like any of those, if they remade those, people would would lose their fucking minds. They would be so happy. Yeah, Lost Odyssey, exactly. Oddworld. Yeah, there you go. Odd world.

And it's not about that. It's not about the IP. It's about the quality of the games. I know this is a real downer, but it's pretty hard not to be frustrated with this news. If there's something I can say to counteract the negativity, it's that Xbox isn't dead. All the news that's been dropped the last few. days is bad. It's very obvious that Xbox has completely recalibrated their business

model. But that doesn't mean it's over. It means there's some major reshuffling going on. They do still have more than 40 games in development. There's at least one more Xbox. Yeah, let's see. This game's going to do well. This one will do well. This one will do well. This one will do well. This one might do well.

This one, I don't. This one will do well. It's just a reload. This one will do well. Residence, I heard this game was pretty good. High on Life. I don't know about this. work revolution insanely like this this trailer was ridiculous this one's probably going to suck uh let's see here persona four will probably do well uh let's see here fall at 76 i don't know see a thieves continually does well and that's about it the other one's probably not so much

maybe super meat boy will be kind of popular but i don't really think so console in the future probably at least that's what we're hearing game pass isn't going to go away 35 million subscribers is a lot. It's maybe not the license to print money, Xbox, and Microsoft hoped it was, but 35 million subscribers is a success. They should hold on to that because that's, if I'm not mistaken, the current game subscription service that is successful. Like, if there's a Netflix equivalent, it's Game Pass. So it is all bad. It's important to keep in mind that even with all these internal issues at Microsoft, they're de facto still the number one games publisher in the world. That is because they own both Bethes and Activision, but still Xbox isn't going anywhere.

And yeah, it's easy to lay the blame on Phil Spencer. And certainly he does deserve plenty. Sarah Bonn. He's responsible and she's responsible to. I don't think it's exclusively their fault, but I think them spreading themselves too thin and working on all these extra products while not maintaining and curating the prime Xbox IPs, Fable, Halo, and Gears. Huge mistake. The president of Xbox and Max Booty, the president of GameCompetent Studios.

They deserve some blame here as well. But I do want to say this. At the end of the day, they are also just cogs in the Microsoft machine. Phil still has to answer to Satya Nadella, the CEO and chairman of Microsoft. And you better believe that it was probably him and not Phil

that was pushing further reduction in staff. And he's right to do that. He's right. And it will be shown that he's right in the coming years. A lot of these studios

will be making the same decisions. These guys aren't stupid. He's not stupid. Like, they know exactly what they're doing. Keeping for it. Unfortunately, though, at the end of the day, Xbox is a small portion

of Microsoft's frankly massive empire. The success is in failures of that division are just a drop in the bucket compared to the revenue that the other divisions bring in, which is an important and humbling reminder of just how seriously the company takes the division, which appears to be not that much. In the past few years, it's an added media brand that sells other products and keeps people in entertainment inside of the Microsoft ecosystem, but it's not its own product by itself. And I think that if Xbox had to exist

without the funding and subsidy from Microsoft, it would probably go out of business. But Xbox can provide a value that's disproportionate to the value that provides to itself, to Microsoft as a whole, that creates its value in the aggregate. And that's one of the things that a lot of people don't understand with why, for example, Amazon doesn't sell Twitch

and why Microsoft doesn't sell Xbox. It's because these things are, they're existing inside of a larger ecosystem that feeds into each other. Xbox Cloud Gaming also runs on Microsoft servers. Yeah, and Microsoft Azer is, I think, 30% of Microsoft's market share, or Microsoft's value and income. It's around, I think it's 25 to 35%. It's felt like the sword of Damocles was just hanging over Xbox, waiting to fall.

We have no idea what's. going on behind the scenes. It's all pure speculation, but it literally just could be that rather than a string of bad decisions. I don't know that I would say it's that, but Phil... I think that they have made a string of bad decisions also. They've released a number of really bad games. That's true. I think that they're making really good structural decisions, but their creative decisions are horrible. Could have been trying to stay the inevitable off for the past few years, just trying to keep the gaming division alive when the vultures at Microsoft's other divisions are circling. I want to note that this is possible and probably

some of the explanation at bare minimum. But it's also not to say that the Xbox team hasn't made serious blunders. The way they've handled their internal studios like 343, the Coalition, and the now closed the initiative, has been a disgrace. Xbox was handed some of the greatest IPs ever, like Halo, Gears of War, and yes, Perfect Dark, It was major potential there, and they squandered it with poor management. Perfect Dark did not have major potential. It didn't have the same type of name recognition. It was a game that was popular on, like, what, Nintendo 64, a GameCube or something?

Like, the game, again, like, it's good that you're making a new version of this, but you're effectively making a new game. I'd like to praise Microsoft's hands-off approach to game development in the past, and it's led to some amazing stuff. Like, look at that gameplay. Does this really make you want to spend sense? $70. Microsoft's hands-off approach to game development in the past.

And it's led to some amazing stuff, especially from Obsidian, who are proving to be the MVP's of the entire division lately. Why would you say that? Avowed was a horrible game. It got blown to fuck out by Oblivion that came out 17 years prior. And also, if it wasn't so bad, then why did they lose staff and the person led the company for Avowed?

Why did the person leave? It was a massive failure Like by all metrics and all ways that you can look at it It was a tremendous and colossal failure Seriously you know who I haven't had to mention up till this point in the video Obsidian that is of note to say the least But in the case of other studios management Like a halo and gears specifically

Maybe a little more hands-on would have been helpful If they had maybe the initiative would have been floundered for nearly 10 years with basically nothing to show for it with perfect dark. Like, I'm sorry. And this game plays garbage. Hunter shouldn't be moving around like this. They should be big lumbering giants, not outrunning Master Chief. This is ridiculous.

This is awful. It totally, like, I'm sorry, but like I played Halo, played Halo 1, played Halo 2, Halo 3. This is not the way it should work. I'm grounded for nearly 10 years with basically nothing to show for it with perfect dark. Like, I'm sorry. but it's not that hard to make a perfect dark game. You could literally just reboot it and do the first game's plot with some changes.

And I think everybody would be pretty psyched as long as it turned out well. Like it doesn't even really have to be original as long as it does what it's supposed to do and adds enough that it's not just the same game again. Like the initiative was formed in 2016. They've had basically nothing but some vertical slices, according to reports.

Compare Microsoft's handling of their students, to someone like Nintendo who's very hands-on. Some developers buckle under the pressure. Yeah, I've seen reports retro. Nintendo has also even said that recently, this is a statement they made in the past couple of days, is that they're even rethinking the way that they develop video games, and they're going to be changing the way that they're developing

to go towards shorter development cycles in order to save money in order to meet customer demands. because the pricing, I think really probably the pricing of Mario Kart was a wake-up call for them. We need Prime 4 now? Yeah, for sure. Samus looks stupid. I can see why people say that, but yeah, it's a little bit out of proportion. That just means more slop. No, it doesn't. I mean, like, that's not true at all.

Metro Studios really struggled with Nintendo working on Metroid Prime, but at the end of the day, it's an all-time great game. With Xbox, it's 10 years of nothing followed by cancellation. And that's always been a problem with Xbox to a certain degree. But this slow, gradual transition from major hardware competitors to third-party software, developer, publisher, whatever, it's sad to see. Maybe in Microsoft's eyes, this is a more profitable direction to take things, but as a gamer, it feels like the mighty have fallen. It feels like the... I totally disagree.

I disagree a lot with this video. this video brings up good points, but I don't think, I don't, I don't agree with his evaluation of a lot of these. I agree with his assessment, but I don't agree with his conclusions. I think the reality is that why would Xbox continue to make consoles in a market that they're already cannibalizing their own sales in? Xbox is in a very unique circumstance that when an Xbox player buys a console and they choose not to play a game, on PC, they're effectively cannibalizing a sale. Because now this is somebody

that already, you've already sold them Windows. You've already decided that now you're selling them the same thing again and it's being sold at a loss. It's just not a commercially good decision in any way. They're a giant corporation now. They only care about profits.

What do you think the smaller companies don't? They all care about profits. Industry itself, the hobby. Not necessarily Xbox. but this is a huge pillar of the gaming industry that is crumbling. I told you I am not a console wars person. Seeing this happen to a big company that was this successful, which technically has a much bigger company behind it, that up until this point has just been willing to fund it to no end.

I mean, if you don't see something in those tea leaves, I don't know if you're looking. That doesn't look good. Like, I will say it could be an economic response to the post-COVID dip, and it may eventually even... out. Maybe all this doom and gloom around Xbox is unwarranted. Maybe they had to make these moves and this is stuff that will end up working out in the future. I don't know. But as an old time game...

Sony's going to do the same thing, by the way. Sony's going to do the same thing that Xbox is doing now with shutting down studios probably. Nintendo, you're probably not going to hear about it because like the way that Nintendo does press and everything is very different. but Sony you'll probably see the same thing happen. Game Bird. Someone who's watched this happen as Sega and now is watching it again with Xbox, but now in a completely different economic climate, seeing how things have been going the last few years just really sucks.

I don't really care about Microsoft's bottom line. I care about video games in the case of this situation. I care about Xbox games and positive feelings I've had about the original console and all the amazing games back on the 360. But more and more, the division feels less like that Xbox and more just Bethesda and Activision because they're really doing the lion's share of the game publishing now. Almost all the old stalwartes at Xbox, the games that put the console on the map, they're seemingly dying.

I hope that's not the case. I hope Halo comes back bigger and better than ever. But right now, that possibility feels... Well, I would Halo come back and be better if they're being made by the same company that's made three bad Halo games? I also think that Microsoft does... a very bad job managing their own IPs. Like whenever I heard that there was going to be a secret level crossover episode

with the Doom Slayer and Master Chief, and for some reason they didn't do that, it gave me the insight to understand that they don't, I don't think that they understand like that type of fan service. Like everybody thinks of fan service is like, you know, your favorite anime girl in a bikini. But there's actually a lot more to it than that. And I think this type of fan service is something that they should be doing.

Very distant. So to answer the question, what the hell is going on in Xbox? What the hell is up with Xbox? What the hell is this? Well, a lot of people are getting fired and some highly anticipated games are getting canceled. Unfortunately, the vaporware nature of both perfect dark and ever wild means that the cancellations are probably justified. This doesn't appeal to anybody. Nobody wants this.

This is going to be a game. It's going to release on Steam. It's going to have 1,200 players. Like, really, like, I'm just being honest. Sorry, somebody's got to say it. These were probably money holes. It's canceled. That doesn't make it not staying, though.

What really sucks is the loss of all these other unnamed games from Bethes, including a new IP from Zenamax. It all just looks really bad for Xbox on the whole. But this was the inevitable result of their purchase of Bethesda and Activision. Like, that's how industry stuff works. Jobs are going to get lost. But I don't know if anybody really predicted how bad this was going to get. The cutting around...

This is only the beginning. It's going to get so much worse. 50% of the staff at turn 10. The guys behind Forza is especially brutal, as are the cuts at Call of Duty developers like Raven and Sledgehammer. I mean, Call of Duty is basically a license to print money. Now, like, that's not changing either. It doesn't have any evidence of changing.

So if you think anyone would be protected, it would be them. It's a bloodbath across the board, and things might sound really bad. Xbox, unfortunately, whether they deserve to or not, is going to weather the storm. What Xbox is going to be after the storm? I have no idea, but Microsoft is a monolith. They're basically untouchable in the tech space. And at least for now, it seems like there's interest in keeping the gaming division alive. otherwise it wouldn't be, you know, a percentage of layout.

They could just shut the whole damn thing down. I don't know. Maybe in the future we'll look back and see this as another step in the decline of Xbox has started all the way back in 2013 with that embarrassing Xbox One reveal or maybe not. That's a really good point. I do think that was the decline of Xbox. The Xbox one definitely broke the trust of, like for me,

the Xbox One reveal made me a PlayStation fan. like I was a big Xbox Andy. Like I had an Xbox backpack in high school. Like I also didn't have a girlfriend. But that kind of goes without saying it totally broke my trust. And the thing is, what's ironic about it now is that I actually think that Xbox is the best publisher out there in terms of ethics. Like Xbox is the most pro consumer publisher between them, Sony and Nintendo. So out of all the three console developers, Xbox is far and away the best.

Hope things stabilize, not just for the future of Xbox, but for the future of gaming. And the developers and workers are still with the company. And hell, the developers and workers that aren't with the company anymore, there is a serious problem if Xbox is facing the need to cut at this rate. That has implications beyond if they keep their job at Xbox. This is an Xbox. This is a tech thing in general. Didn't meta drop 20,000 employees last year? This is happening on a macro level.

To be jobs elsewhere to get. There's a lot up in the air right now. Morale has got to be at rock bottom at the company too. Hopefully things improve for these guys and they're able to make great games. Because that's what matters, right? That's what we all hope happens. What do you think?

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I'm Falcon, you can follow me on Twitter. At Falcon the Hero. We'll see you next time right here on Game Ranks. It's funny because I literally disagreed with pretty much every point that he made in this video, but I do appreciate videos like this being made. I think that his analysis is looking at Xbox inside of a vacuum. And there's a video, give it a light. GameRanks is great.

I mean, they're amazing. And even though I disagree with them, for me, in a lot of ways, I like videos. I disagree with more. I get to talk about it more. So, yeah, that's really how I see it. DEI hires or causing problems or are they cutting entire programs. I think it's probably a bit of both. I do.

And yeah, give the video a like. give them a sub. I mean, game ranks is huge. And it's every single industry, every corner of the world. There are people of control and power. I have no idea what they're doing. Yeah, exactly. It's happening everywhere. Tail is all as tiny and small. It's a lot of indie studios popping up on the horizon with great passion projects. Yeah, that's a great thing too. Xbox has got to reevaluate the kind of games they're making.

They got to stop making dog shit that nobody wants. Western gaming studios are infected with a virus of the mind. They think that people want to want fat, ugly, middle-aged women. women do karate tricks and kung fu no nobody wants that they don't want that that's not it you've got to make real games you've got to make games for gamers if you're not making games for gamers you're having problems like whenever i saw that gears of war e-day trailer i thought to myself maybe finally they're learning it was just marcus and dom fighting a fucking uh some demon and that was it. There was no bullshit. There was no weird

messaging. It was just two dudes killing a dude. That's it. If you look at Doom the Dark Ages, I think that game was really bad. I think it was just a bad game. I know it might be an unpopular opinion, but when I compare the aura and the gameplay and the quality of something like Space Marine 2, with Doom, which are two games, I really compare them a lot.

It's not even in the same universe. In the competition standpoint, Xbox is not competing with anyone. None of their existing IPs are even close to Blackmouth, Wukong, Elder Ring, God, or War, they're only losing money and spending to lose more money. No, no, no. If they made a new Halo and also Warzone was the biggest BR, maybe not bigger than Fortnite, to be fair.

Fortnite is just unstoppable. But other than not, Warzone was the biggest BR in 2020 and maybe also 2021. It was a huge success. Like, nobody should be thinking about that. Yeah, even PubG. Yeah, and PubG was published by Microsoft too. I'm pretty sure too. Yeah, like, they pop the fuck off.

Like, they've had a number of really big Ws. And here's a W right here. The Oblivion remaster, they shadow drop this. And I don't know how many games, how many, how many copies, copies they sold, but they had over 100, 200,000 people playing this game concurrently on just Steam. Warzone was so ass. No, Warzone when it came out, brought in loadouts and the Goulag, which totally changed the way that BR's work. And that even had other companies like Respawn, I think respawn makes Apex, then they had the cards so you can bring people back too.

Yeah, the buybacks, yeah, and all that. Like, there was a lot of it. Now, I, here it's dog shit? Yeah, they haven't managed the IP very well. But before that, it was great. Warson was really good. Yeah, it was. Warzone was amazing at launch. I played it every day, man. I played it every single day. It was so fucking fun. But yeah, PubG is still huge in Asia. Yeah, I know it is. But either way, I think Xbox has a really bright future. And I think the reason why people don't see it is because they don't understand that Xbox's future is something Xbox is going to exist as a service. and not as a machine. That's, I think, what people don't understand yet.

And Xbox is going to sell machines that are optimized to deliver that service, but primarily the service is going to be the product. And I think that's what... Sure, buddy, I'm telling you, that's what I think is going to happen. I could be wrong. That's what I think.