TBPN - Ben Thompson Explains the XBOX Disaster

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

This is our full conversation with Ben Thompson.We discuss why Microsoft's Xbox strategy failed, why he thinks GTA 6 should cost $200, how console wars shaped the modern gaming industry, what went wrong with Xbox Game Pass, why AI is reshaping competition across tech, the future of Microsoft's gaming business, and why regulators often block mergers at exactly the wrong time.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Codex - http://openAI.com/codexSign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.comFollow TBPN:https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Ben Thompson, the founder of Stretoree. He's been on an absolute tear during a slow news cycle. Does it feel like a slow news cycle to you? I don't know. And this summer is always slow. I take a couple days. I slow down a little bit myself. I feel like you've done a good job of like providing really insightful and interesting pieces during a slow time where I didn't know that I wanted to hear.

I'm doing you a favor. Yeah, you are. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah. I didn't know I wanted you to adopt the voice of Mark Zuckerberg for 20 minutes and go on a term. But it's not like that was driven by like a specific, okay, there's a Wallsure Journal article where like Bloomberg has a scoop and like we need to know this. It's more just like resetting on the meta narrative. I want to talk about the meta narrative.

But can we start with Xbox? Sure. I want to know first let's go back in time a little bit. And I want you to reality check me on the story I tell myself about how Microsoft wound up in the situation it wound up in with Xbox. And I think it stems with DirectX. It's the graphics layer that allowed games to be run on multiple graphics cards. So that was a Microsoft licensed piece of property. So this is why we don't have the Chrome box.

You want to go really far back. Like, like, because we didn't get an Amazon gaming console. We didn't get a Google gaming console, right? Right. Like, why? Well, DirectX is interesting. So you go back way back. I mean, we can go really far back here.

Please. I mean, back in the day, the main technology for doing 3D was coming along was OpenGL. And OpenGL had various pluses or minuses. It was, you know, we're way back in history. But this is the origin of the Nvidia story, making. cards to do 3D graphics. You had like the Riva, the 128, the TNT, then you had the G-FORCE. And like, we're talking back in the 90s when I was, you know, your guys age or whatever was in college. And, you know, making the first, you know, Quake comes out, like the real

first 3D game, you know, there's actually a really interesting Twitter back and forth with the old id people talking about Quake and how basically they obliterated the company by burning everyone out by watching it. But super fun back and forth. But Microsoft comes out with Direct 3D as an alternative to OpenGL. That was, I think, and this is a little out of my area of expertise, but I think it was a little easier to use, had more niceties, was more tied into the platform.

But this is all sort of PC gaming. The Xbox, the way I think about it, and a lot of gamers kind of get annoyed and right about the gaming stuff, because I don't really care about the game part of it. I'm more interested in like the strategy. in how that fits in the overall company. Yeah, but what is your review? Yeah, can we get a GTA6 review?

No, well, I feel, I feel compelled. Number one, I feel Rockstar, I think, is charging way too little for this game. They're charging, what, $80? Yes. Like, this is a game. You're going to get canceled for this. This is a nuclear take. No, they should be charged like $200 for this game.

I know. I know. GTA6 is like the last great game. Yeah. Like you think about everything, it was both of all made pre-AI. Like it is the pinnacle of this AAA craftsmanship years and years and years of blood and sweat and tears to the extent where you have like the Twitter analyst like counting cigarette butts outside of the opposite to see like how much crunch are they in right now. I don't even think he's trading the stock. I don't even think he's trading the stock. I think he just wants to know what the Lowe's the game. Literally the game. Gamers are insane.

So I always tread in this water like very, very carefully. But, no, so I feel compelled to buy GTA 6 just in honor of it existing, even if I don't know if I'm ever going to plan. So I'm definitely going to do that. And I'd be happy to pay, yes, $200. Like $80 is ridiculous. They should charge of work. Anyhow. Yeah, we had the youngest person on our team was commenting on people online complaining about the price and said something like, you didn't have, you had 10 years, you couldn't save up 80 bucks.

I know. Seriously. It's like whoever you are like I know kids that do lemonade stands and they clear like a hundred bucks. Yeah. You know, absolutely. I want you know, the old $20. I'll keep the change. Nothing will make a kid's day better than that. Although unfortunately with inflation, I think now it's sort of like expected. It's unbelievable. It's expensive things. It's bad. So, yeah, I don't know how I got to get a DTA6. But we're back. Oh, so the console, the console era. So the way I think about Xbox is you go back to Microsoft.

and Microsoft had this whole thing. This is pre-iPhone. This is idea of their corporate strategy was three screens in the cloud. And the idea that we're going to, we already own the desk via the PC, we're going to own the pocket via the phone. And people always to say Microsoft missed mobile. Microsoft did not miss mobile. They came out with a Windows CE in 1999. Like they were in mobile. They just had the totally wrong conceptual model because they were basing it around, you know, as an extension of the PC. But then the third screen was the living room. How do we get in the living room? Well, people have consoles plugged in their TVs. If we can get in and own the console, we can own sort of the gateway to the living room.

And we need to earn permission to be in the living room. We will do that by creating the Xbox, the game console. And what's interesting about this is this is a strategy that totally failed. And it failed for a kind of an obvious reason. retrospect, which is first and foremost, people buy consoles to play games, not to have a portal to the internet in their living room. And so you're selling a multi-hundred dollar sort of console to people who want to play games, but people who don't want to play games aren't going to randomly start buying consoles.

What actually ended up taking it over was things like the Firestick or, you know, Apple TV may have played this. I still think it's like probably the best solution, but it's way too expensive. Now, the Apple TV's poor price got jacked to the moon with this recent memory increase. But the fire stick is probably a big one. You had the Chromecast, you had Roku TV. You had, you know, these, which ended up being, it's not that it's a classic Microsoft thing. They were actually right.

There was this new front page to online services to be built. They just took totally the wrong approach with Xbox. And what's funny is that this approach actually became this uberos of self-mutilation, because the Xbox didn't succeed in achieving this because the games console is way too expensive to achieve this. But then also they killed the Xbox where Xbox 360 was pretty competitive. And that generation is actually the most interesting console generation. I'm happy to expound on that if you want to. But they come out after out the Xbox one, I think, which was super expensive because it had the connect built in,

that sort of like wave your hands around sort of thing. And it had much more like restrictive DRM things. It was going to be more digital. It was basically that console was designed around, we're going to realize our vision and own the living room. And gamers hated it. So they rejected it. So their vision, which they didn't achieve,

also killed their console. And so I wrote over a decade ago. And the whole Xbox saga is filled with regrets, I think. First and foremost for Microsoft, but also for me, Because I, from the beginning, is like, they need to kill this program. They need to spin it out or get rid of it. The stated goals, which made sense from a corporate perspective, were not achieved. And it is continuing to exist because it exists.

And I was actually sympathetic to that. I worked at Microsoft from 2011, 2013, when Microsoft was in the dumps. And, you know, they were still had a great business, but their stock had been like $40. for like a decade. And the one thing the employees has, like, well, at least we have Xbox, all the cool kids over there. Like, it was such an important thing to corporate culture to have Xbox, even though this was a totally failed division in terms of achieving corporate goals and also was sort of self-immolating

because it was trying to achieve corporate goals that it was not going to achieve. Yeah. What do you think the naming scheme says about that project? I always found it very odd that they went from Xbox to Xbox to Xbox 360. That sounds like the third. It's actually the second. Then Xbox one is the third, but it's one. And then now they're on Series X, which feels like the 10th, but it's the fourth. And then they have a bunch of subnames. It feels like they just didn't, they never leaned into just like Xbox 2, Xbox 3, Xbox 4. Yeah. Well, you're asked, I mean, maybe it shows I worked on Microsoft. You're asking the wrong guy about naming things, I think. But yeah, total mess. They called it the 360 because it was coming out the same generation as the PlayStation 3. And so they wanted to, well, they wanted to be on the same level.

Yeah, yeah, we both have sort of a three in our name. Yeah. So what's interesting with the PlayStation 3 is the PlayStation 3 was Sony's big misstep in terms of the whole PlayStation era. What they, they had this crazy processor called the cell processor that had all these capabilities. And they had, up to that point, consoles were differentiated by hardware. And so Sony famously helped, one of the reasons they beat Nintendo was they had, discs so they could have much larger like media and things on those lines and whereas Nintendo was sticking with cartridges and there was like other like

they were much more favorable to third-party developers just in general that they had sort of taken over in PlayStation 1 and 2 PlayStation 3 comes along they produce this oh they wanted to get Blu-ray off the ground that's another example of consoles getting screwed up by trying to attempt to other corporate priorities they it worked yeah what didn't they win and and didn't Xbox go with HG DVD and they lost? They did, but at the end of the day, what happened was the PlayStation 3 was way too expensive. I think it ran super hot if I remember. And all these extra capabilities were not used. And the reason they weren't used is that was the first HD generation. And you

had this shift to 3D games and high definition graphics. And what happened was it used to be games differentiated themselves by how well they wrote the game. Like how did it perform on your Super Nintendo, on your Nintendo. Now we move to a world of actually all the actual game was offloaded to engines, game engines. Like, you know, it had one. Obviously, it were epic, got super big with the Unreal engine. And so you no longer did that. What a game company did was actually design the game and then asset creation.

And asset creation at HD was way more difficult, way more expensive than it was for standard deficit TVs. And so the economic imperative for developers came, we can't just be on PlayStation. We need to be on everything. And so that was the ultimate generation in almost every game was made to run everywhere. Run on PS3, run on Xbox 360, and running on the PC. And that was also the Xbox 360's best generation. That was the one they were the most competitive on because they had all the games,

because all developers were making them sort of run everywhere. They had a very simple to develop for architecture. The 360 was very PC-like, even more so than the one sort of previously. And that was their best generation. And then they come back the next generation, shoving connect down people's throats. We're going to own the TV. And meanwhile, Sony learned their lesson. They're like, okay, we can't differentiate our hardware.

We need to create sort of generic hardware that is easy to develop for. And the way we will differentiate is through exclusives. They bought a bunch of small studios in contrast like buying Activision. Yeah. So you can get to a little bit. They bought a bunch of small studios and pushed all those studios to developing killer. games for the upcoming PS4 and so you got things like like the Spider-Man like that was a huge game Nottie Dog last of us that type of stuff exactly yeah I

mean and so the PS4 was an unbelievable generation yeah and in a lot of the reasons unbelievable was because it had these exclusive games and they just crushed Microsoft because for all the cross-platform games the call of duties the Maddens things like that those are always ran everywhere and so what you do is you limit the economic potential of your studios because you're only building for your platform and you make it back by all the licensing fees you get off the EAs of the world and the activists of the world because 80% of gamers are on your console not on the other guys console and so they just wiped out Microsoft

in that generation and that really just continued to the PS5 and this is where we sort of get to the game pass disaster okay yes so uh yeah i want to yeah let's just jump forward forward to that. How is it disaster? I didn't want to ramble too long. That's going to give you a chance to jump in. We love it. We love it. I have a bunch of other questions not related to gaming, but I like, I love this. Oh, I think the console, the console history is fascinating.

It's really interesting how sort of, because it tracks technological change to such a large extent, and it totally shifted sort of strategy. So, and yeah, I think you can draw, I think you can draw a lot of real parallels, even just model releases over the last couple years, how, you know, certain decisions around one. decisions around one model sets you back a certain number you know they're iterating a lot faster but i'm i'm seeing parallel yeah the sort of development of yeah it's interesting you can always sort of draw draw lessons so you get to Microsoft at this point again i think i wrote at the time away time to give up like i wrote multiple times of the years they should give up on xbox and uh

and at this point mcrosoft was there ever an option after they bought uh activision just to make call duty a console exclusive or would that have been an FTC problem? Well, we'll get to that, because that's part of the story here. So Microsoft decides, okay, we're going to actually try a new business model. It's true Xbox sort of selling a console, selling, you know, licensing it. We kind of do that, but we're actually moving to being a services company. The stock's doing much better now, you know, like we have Azure, all these things. What we need to do, and the way we compete with Sony is we need to have the exact opposite of the Sony strategy.

We need to lean into services, lean into subscriptions. We're going to do Xbox Game Pass. And the idea of Xbox Game Pass is instead of buying every individual game for $60, $70, $80. Gaming pricing, by the way, really has stayed suppressed probably far longer than it should have been, particularly for the AAA games, but we already got to that with Rockstar. So they're like, you pay one price per month and you get access to all the games and game paths. Well, of course, no publisher wants to partake in this because they make all their money up front by selling games to their biggest fans. You know, it's kind of like the movie model.

You make a bunch of money up front. And yeah, in the long run. Were they looking at what happened to the music industry as an example of saying like, yeah, it's cool to make your product more accessible. You get more listeners by bundling and streaming. That was the bet. You had to make it up in volume, right? And so this why the series S came about, there's the series X and the series S. The series S was a more underpowered but much cheaper model.

I think it launched at $300 versus the X was, I think, $600 or maybe $500. And that was also a problem because you're kind of neutering the X because developers built to the lowest common denominator. That's not sort of the highest one. So that was one problem. But the idea was we're going to expand the market. And they have these package deals where you get an S and you get Game Pass for a year. And it's this sort of thing. And we will make it up.

And the problem is no independent developer is going to go for that. So they had some of their own games, but they went out and started buying a bunch of developers. So they bought Bethesda, which included, I think, it at that point. And Zennimax, the, uh, the, uh, the elder role is like, they have a bunch of like that's right. IP libraries, but those, but those developers just aren't releasing like incredible titles annually, except for Activision, which does have a video release game. Exactly. And so the issue, so the issue with buying these companies is their, what you're paying for is you're paying for their existing business plus the premium. And their existing business was selling single copies of games to all platforms.

And what they were saying is we're going to basically force all these studios to take a bath, to lose a ton of money by putting all their games on Game Pass. We'll still sell on PlayStation because we have to, because that's a lot of money. It would be massively economically destructive not to. But what we think's going to happen is gamers are going to realize I could be paying $70 a pop on PlayStation or I could go to Xbox and I could pay $20 a month and I can get all these games. That's it. What a better deal. And by the way, we'll get new gamers. People are going to come in and realize, wow, I can get all these games for $20 a month. None of that happened. All they did was cannibalize their existing business. They didn't expand the market for console gamers. All they did was have gamers who would have paid way more to play these games, pay way less to pay these games, and Microsoft ate it. And they, I think the, you know, the recent reporting was they expected to have 75 million game passes.

subscribers by this year, they have like 30 million, and that number is actually decreasing. It's not going up. And so it's just been, and so that's sort of the context of what's happened here. Phil Spencer got retired, which if you retire at that level of a company, you're probably canned. Probably too late. The whole strategy of disaster, they brought in new leadership, and now there's sort of like a reset going on. They're laying off a few thousand people. They say all games production are going to continue, but there's a real sort of critical decision here. What do we do?

Because we ended up getting stuck in the middle. And we're just, this doesn't work. What did you read into their approach of laying off 1,600 people now and keeping a 1,600 person riff? I mean, it's a terrible idea. Like, everyone there for the rest of the years. Like a VC, like every VC would tell you to like just cut hard, cut deep. And then move forward with the team.

If you're on the ship, we're going to Valholla together. I think I do have some sympathy because the reality is I appreciated the note because they are in big trouble. And there's an aspect of just stating it clearly. were not sugar-coding it. And if they laid out how much trouble they were in and then only cut 1,600 people, then everyone kind of knows they're going to be cutting more people.

So I think they're just in a bad spot. So of course it's not great. It's going to destroy morale. It's going to destroy everything for the next year because everyone's way to get fired. But they did, I think, tear the band-aid off to the extent they could. And now they can be very overt.

They can go through and actually talk to employees. about what are you working on? Why should you still be here? And it's a reflection of the employment climate, like people in general are more, they're just not going to bail. Microsoft, you know, they're going to want to keep their job. And so they can probably, hopefully, fingers crossed, do better cuts by virtue of doing them in the open. But I don't know. I mean, I don't envy Xbox's leadership at all. It's going to be a very tough thing, but I can totally understand how they are where they are. probability of a spin out. I mean, I think it, I think it needs to happen. Like I, but, you know, this is, again, the regret is this was my take for years and years and years and years. I'm like, okay, fine, Xbox game past. That seems kind of interesting. Let's go for it.

It should have stuck to my guns. They're like, no, stop. This is going to be a disaster. I think, yeah, I don't, I don't get it. I just don't, I didn't see it before. The thing that got me to say, okay, let's give it a chance. Didn't work. I don't see it now.

I think it does give me pause. They hired Matthew Ball, who I've balanced trajectory multiple times. As their chief strategy officer, I have a lot of respect for his takes. So I'm curious what he's thinking about. This gets to the question before, is there a bit where they just write off these acquisitions

and say, actually all this stuff's going to be exclusive now? We're like, call of duty, buy an Xbox. Like basically giving into the FTC's worst fears, which, but those fears didn't make sense at the time in the context. Because by writing off, I mean, acknowledging we lost billions and billions of dollars. Yeah, and it would test, it would be a good pricing test for the power of a AAA game to say, okay, you can only get Call of Duty on Xbox now. And you would see, like, how many incremental Xbox sales do you get?

Because that means the real value of the game is actually in the hundreds of dollars. if people have a PlayStation, and then they'll try something new. Switching gears a little bit, we keep having this experience where there's a company, you know, an AI company, let's say an application layer company that is, or lab, that is, you know, hot, but then you don't hear very much for a few months and you write them off, and then they come out and they've, like, added hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and are doing a crazy upround. And it's this weird thing where, like, even, you know, historically, you know,

There's power laws everywhere, but I feel like in this moment we're seeing more and more examples where like the 10th best company in the category is still having the financial performance that a company that would have been the leading company in their category five years ago. What do you make it? What do you make it at? This is just a thing in tech in general that is always sort of stuck out at me. I mean, I think I. Has it been though, but like CRM, for example. Like if you go back to like 2000, 2015 was like the 10th best CRM company like actually printed. No, of course not. No, no. The example I always go back to is I think it was 2014 or so when Apple bought beats.

And they bought beats for $3 billion. And everyone's going, the tech press is going crazy. Everyone's running thought pieces about it. And I'm like, you know, of course writing about it. I'm like, $3 billion. Like Apple is a $500 billion company. What does $3 billion matter? And what's funny about that take is number one, it was right, who cares about $3 billion? That's in our couch cushions. Like people were spun up also that didn't really matter. Number two, Apple is only a $500 billion company. Like the astronomical increase in valuation and numbers around this is absolutely crazy.

So to your point, yeah, a 2019 CRM company, number one, there probably wasn't a number 10 even then. But yeah, the numbers are not even remotely tied to like any. I just sort of let them go and be like I write down the numbers and they don't really mean. anything to me. But it's very hard to keep track of. Like the inflation in tech numbers specifically, you know, you think that, what was I complaining about pricing before? Oh yeah, lemonade stands are bad. The Silicon Valley lemonade stand inflation is absolutely the worst in the world. On mergers and acquisitions, there's this news today about Getty images calling off shutter stock deal after UK regulators said that they would have to sell the editorial business for the merger

to be approved. And it seemed very odd to me that a merger would be blocked by a regulator when that industry that is consolidating and is maybe becoming more monopolistic is under such insane attack from generative AI. I can't imagine a better defensive move than putting Getty images and shutterstock together. This happens, this is, this happens every single time. Like the natural response to your overall category being threatened by an external force is consolidation. Like it's the only way to defend yourself to sort of, you know, you get synergies. Like all these companies are pretty established. So it's actually fairly easy to price. You know exactly what things are. It's a much like we have growing companies you

want to merge them or acquire them. It's really unclear because how you sort of price out the future. These companies are declining. So it's very easy. Like you could do a discounted cash flow and understand exactly how much they're worth. It's a very straightforward negotiation. It makes total sense for them to consolidate date, but precisely because they're knowable and understandable, it's very easy for regulators to block them. And you see this happen again and again. You see like pushback on, you saw this with TV and like different networks getting together and the various pushbacks happen to that or in telecoms. Like the this happens, this is a natural pattern. The moment that a company, an industry wants to consolidate, needs to consolidate is the moment regulators are

most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the actual time when action would matter, like when it's growing and a company is making the right acquisitions to take over an industry, regulators don't do anything and also rightly don't do anything because you're dealing with the future and it's unknown, you don't want to screw it up. It raises the question of what you do regulators sort of do.

Anyway, in broad strokes, I used to be, I've sort of, you know, I think that they probably do more harm than good as far as a lot of these sort of blocking mergers and things go. But I don't know. I'm the one that just said maybe Microsoft's a take Call of Duty exclusive. So who knows? Maybe I'll have something in the face. We had a funny moment because we were looking. It's a $3.7 billion deal.

But I'm like, how is this a $3.7 billion deal? Both these are two, 300 million-ish market cap companies. And it was because the deal was like priced back in January of 2025. And so both companies have declined so much. Combined Mark kept under a burden now. Over the last 18 months. So maybe they shouldn't leave the deal anyway. I don't know.

I mean, it could be worse. You could be Netflix and have the stock market and sort of like make a bid for Warner Brothers that the stock market hates abandon the deal. But they already decided you did the deal because you're desperate. You're screwed anyway. So yeah, you don't even get what you bid for. So maybe that's what happened here.

I don't know. Oh, well. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great summer. enjoy the break and we'll see you soon. Yeah, good luck with the lemonade stands. Yes. Try to make it through summer.

Stay solvent. You're going to run up on a kid that has Klarna. You're going to raise some money. Yeah, I know. Exactly. Yeah, Clarena and a lemonade stand. Five easy payments. Probably happens in Silicon Valley.

Well, thank you so much and have a great rest of your week. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, back to later. Have a good one.