Microsoft has always been clueless about Gaming

so Microsoft recently had yet another round of mass layoffs this time with some really heart-wrenching closers like Arcane Austin who worked on beloved titles like prey as well as the shuttering of Tango Gameworks who put out the much beloved Hi-Fi Rush at the beginning of last year which I still honestly think deserve to at least get nominated for game of the year at more places and frankly I've long since gotten tired of hearing nothing out of Microsoft but how they're laying off record numbers of people it feels like they've done nothing but lay off thousands of developers ever since they've acquired these huge companies like Bethesda and Activision and I just don't see how in this era where one of their biggest problems is having such a massive drought of good content for their consoles how having less Talent at their disposal is supposed to somehow improve the situation so I thought that with my mood now officially soured by the continued non-stop news of Microsoft firing more people that maybe now is a good time to take a look back at the history of Microsoft's foray into gaming as a whole and really think about the question that I posed as the title of this video which is has Microsoft ever really known what they're doing in the gaming space so let's start at the beginning way back when in 2001 with the original Xbox so I'll fully admit that they did do a few things right with the with this original console Sega was very obviously floundering in the Market at the time and I think most people could see the writing on the wall that there was about to be a big hole in the market so Xbox saw that opportunity and jumped in to fill that hole and the console itself really isn't that terrible it was the first console to feature a hard drive so that it didn't require the use of memory cards and it supported an ethernet connection which helped them really get a good foothold in the online gaming space it honestly was pretty Forward Thinking All Things Considered although it definitely was not without its faults like it could technically support playing DVDs like the PS2 did but it also required you to buy this like extra kit just to be able to use a remote to actually control the playback which seems incredibly weird and shortsighted especially when the PS2 could also play DVDs and had no such drawbacks by just letting you control the DVD with your controller but speaking of the controller I mean do I even need to explain the problems with the Duke I mean just look at this thing it was so massive that I'm pretty sure the only person working their QA Department must have been sha or something and there were some questionable choices made with the button layout the face buttons were weirdly ovular and instead of opting to have multiple trigger buttons like the PlayStation they ended up having these white and black buttons that it seems like few games actually utilized for much and famously it had what is considered by many to be the worst d-pad on any official controller ever made but you know I really shouldn't Focus that much on the hardware arguably what matters far more than Hardware is the software like what games came out for the console well you probably know the game I'm going to mention first because Halo was one of the most influential games of the early 2000s every major firstperson shooter that came out for years and years was dubbed either a Halo clone or a Halo killer because that was the measuring stick that every other shooter was compared to at the time it really cannot be overstated how insanely huge Halo was for both Microsoft and gaming as a whole but at the same time let's not pretend that Microsoft was the reason why Halo did so well Bungie was already hard at work on Halo for years and mic just kind of bought them Midway through development and turned their game into a launch title for their console it's incredibly easy to imagine an alternate universe where that deal never happened or maybe they just bought a different Studio instead and Halo ended up primarily being a PC game like halflife or at the very least a multiplatform title and I just have to speculate like in this world where Halo isn't the killer app for the Xbox what else did Microsoft really bring to the table to draw people to their console like don't get me wrong I'm sure you guys bought plenty of games on your Xbox back in the day but my point is that Halo was the main reason why most anyone even bought an Xbox in the first place a lot of games like Mor wind and soulcaliber whatnot that were on the Xbox were also available on PC or other consoles so I don't know if they'd really draw people to the Xbox specifically more than just being a nice bonus after you get tired of playing Halo and when you look at actual exclusives Beyond Halo like what was there really to push consoles out the door like yeah Fable one was popular but is it really a system seller like Halo was you know like shenmu blinks the time sweeper Drake and the 99 dra you know and like maybe that seems unfair like obviously any console would do worse if you remove their biggest IP but the point of getting at is that Xbox at the time feels a lot more dependent on that singular Halo IP than its competition at least in my opinion like if you took away Zelda from Nintendo they would still have huge franchises with Mario and its various offshoots Plus other franchises like Kirby and Metroid and Pokemon that are all huge in their own right and Playstation had their own set of solid mascots between rat Clank Spyro god of war and so on but the Xbox was Halo and I feel like anyone who's anyone only bought other games for the Xbox after buying the console to play Halo and I feel like if Microsoft hadn't gotten so insanely lucky with just picking the right studio with the right game to sell their console then I'm not entirely certain that they would have even made it to the next Generation but speaking of those future Generations let's move on to the 360 and the 360 is an interesting console because in many ways I feel like they simultaneously did a lot more things right when compared to the original Xbox while also getting absurdly lucky due to the circumstances of the time they seemingly took a lot of the criticism of the original Xbox to heart and made some legitimately good changes both the 360 console and controller were Slimmer and more ergonomic which made it a appeal to a much wider Market compared to the original Xbox and if I'm being perfectly honest the 360 controller was such a massive Improvement that it basically became the template that almost all other game controllers are now based off of even the current PlayStation controller is now shaped more like a 360 Gamepad compared to the previous PlayStation controllers and Nintendo now pretty much regularly makes Pro controllers for all their consoles that basically are just 360 gam pads so again credit where credits due they did a legitimately good job with that but when looking at the generation as a whole I have to say that I feel like Xbox kind of coasted their way to success in the 360 generation especially when you take into account what was going on with all the other consoles when you look at the Wii this was the era that Nintendo really started to just go off in their own Direction entirely the Wii was significantly less powerful than other consoles so a lot of high-end multi-platform titles just never made their way to the Wii despite how well it's sold and with the motion control gimmick that meant that most Studios that were trying to focus on the Wii ended up doing something that was completely different over there so while the Wii did sell insanely well and outsold every other console that generation it was also clearly appealing to a very different Market which mostly left the primary you know hardcore gamer Market to battle over the 360 and the PS3 but then if you look at the PS3 well I think that the biggest thing that people remember from the PS3 launch was $599 $659 Canadian yeah the PS3 kind of cost an insane amount at launch which meant that most people's default option just based on price alone would have been the 360 the PS3 also had some weird hardware issues going on as well like from what I can find it was technically the strongest console of the generation but it wasn't by a huge amount and it was mostly due to a very Arcane cell processor design that while powerful was also apparently really difficult to code for according to many developers so actually optimizing games to utilize the full power of the PS3 often just didn't happen at least not without a few patches down the line or until far later in the console generation so as a result much of the seventh generation of consoles had multiplatform titles just running better on the 360 because it was just normal and easier to develop for so as such a lot of developers would end up developing primarily for the Xbox even without exclusivity deals simply because of what was going on at the time it was kind of The Perfect Storm for Microsoft like you could not ask for a more ideal circumstance to launch your console into and that led to them getting tons and tons of games without them really even trying so literally all they had to do to succeed at this generation of consoles was to not have the Xbox literally fall apart at the seams like Frosty the Snowman and the Bahamas some faulty Xbox 360s are literally melting down while running certain games ah the red rings of Doom signal that your Xbox 360 is fried Microsoft hasn't specified the cause but users say the console's cooling system just can't take the heat of a lot of plague oh yeah there was a that whole debacle essentially in their attempts to make the 360 so sleek and pretty looking they kind of neglected the build quality from what I understand it was a combination of poor thermals combined with bad soldering which resulted in numerous Hardware failures in countless 360s for years on end but honestly I think that Microsoft was saved from this debacle by the circumstances of their gener eration like I said the Wii was already appealing to a completely different market so if you were more interested in games like Call of Duty then you probably weren't going to buy a Wii anyways and it wasn't like people knew about the red ring of death thing before the console launch so most people got invested into the Xbox ecosystem long before their console started melting plus services like the Xboxes paid online only encouraged people to stick through it and since the PS3 was so expensive I think most people would rather just try to get their 360 pred instead of swapping over to the other console if it was virtually any other generation where Microsoft would have had to deal with more normal competition if they hadn't launched a year ahead of everyone else to really get their foot in the door and get people building up a library before their competition was even on the market then the red ring of death Saga could have easily done way more harm to the company than it ended up doing so once again I feel like it was really luck that was carrying the Xbox through these times despite how good the 360 generation was for Microsoft and that brings us to the eighth generation of consoles and this is really where Xbox's luck finally started to run out Sony really got their act together after the debacle that was the PS3 and made a much more standardized PS4 that was easier to develop for and Nintendo well Nintendo was still off doing its own thing making their own mistakes at the time but oh boy were there so many unforced errors with the Xbox one I mean just to start with the name Nintendo might still take the cake with the Wii U and the terrible names department but my God the Xbox one is right up there like the 360 at least made some sense they didn't want to call it the Xbox 2 when PS3 was their competition but then they go in a full 180 and call it the Xbox one against the PS4 like what kind of logic is that I mean I'm pretty sure most people think that calling it the Xbox 720 or the next box would have unironically been better names and I mean okay putting the name aside let's just run down the list of issues with the console and I mean we can basically find all of the problems that Microsoft had by just talking about what they were so proud to show off during their 2013 conference right off the bat their plan was to have the console itself equipped with always online DRM it's not that you need to be online to play online games or for certain features to work no it was stated to require you to be online for the console to function at all even if you were playing just a single player game which just is a level of insane tone deafness that it boggles the mind like people were already mad at individual games having always online DRM in this era that Sim City game that came out in 2013 had this exact same kind of DRM and that came out in March earlier that year and that already sparked a huge outrage at the time especially when it was shown that you could just comment out like a single line of code to disable the DRM and the game would continue to function just fine offline so the fact that Microsoft couldn't see the writing on the wall here is just mind-blowingly oblivious especially with their follow-ups to this announcement where they talked about how backwards compatibility was backwards thinking and that if you couldn't reliably maintain an online connection then you should just keep playing on a 360 instead which is just like wow I hope that that guy got fired and speaking of DRM there was also the fact that the console itself was designed to basically kill off the concept of used games and sharing games with your friend as soon as a game was inserted into the console it was designed to never work in any other console again and I mean not only did everyone rightfully hate this but it just gave Sony a free layup to dunk on them in the following Days by simply saying that they wouldn't do that and then everybody gave them an absurd amount of Applause for it furthermore a huge part of their marketing was spent talking about all of the non-gaming features like how you could plug your cable box into the console and use it to watch TV with additional features and like again 2013 might have been a while ago by now but people were already cutting cable by this point especially younger people that were more interested in video games over TV shows so this just feels like yet another completely toned deaf designed to decision that completely ignores their core Target demographic like yeah they were clearly trying to appeal to a wider Market but who in the right mind is spending $500 in addition to their cable package just to be able to use an Xbox controller to change the channel and I mean while we're talking about the price they did what Sony did the previous generation and solded their console for a solid hundred bucks more than their most direct competition which is always a good way to shoot yourself in the foot right on the starting line but hey what did that extra 100 bucks G you well it came with a connect sold in the console itself what's that the connect was a piece of garbage that never really worked properly and nobody liked it well now everybody who buys an Xbox one will be forced to own it like yeah I know the connect was technically a mistake they made back in the 360 generation but at least back then it was just an optional add-on hoping the chase the success of the Wii having their next console require the connect despite all the issues it had and then as a direct direct result of that causing the console to release at a significantly higher price than their competition might honestly be their biggest mistake and that's saying something considering what we've talked about so far honestly I could probably make an entire video just about how terrible of an idea the connect was so I should probably move on before I start ranting for hours about it but if you want to see me make that video in the future let me know down in the comments below but yeah as a consequence of all of these terrible decisions they were making combined with Sony getting their act together with a more normal console they essentially lost all of the momentum and advantages that they had from the 360 generation they no longer had the benefit of being the default option that most developers are making game for so multiplatform titles often ended up doing better on the PS4 if only because it was cheaper to buy and there wasn't nearly as many exclusive games on the console because developers just lacked any real incentive to make them so the only noteworthy exclusives left were mostly just what Microsoft hired people directly to make and like something I saw pointed out a couple times while looking back on this is that most of the Xbox One's exclusives were announced at that initial press conference you know you got Forza Halo Sunset Overdrive Etc but of course another problem is that PC gaming only continued to grow over time by this era so more and more people were opting to just get a gaming PC and so exclusives that are only exclusive from other consoles and not PC were becoming less and less valuable to a console as PC became more and more of a legitimate competitor to those consoles so when you have games like Titanfall which are legitimately amazing but are also available on PC in addition to your console it kind of loses a lot of the power it might have had in convincing people to buy an Xbox like Sony has been porting a lot of their games to PC as well lately but they usually give it like a year or two long grace period before that Port comes out so there's usually still a pretty solid reason to buy a PlayStation if you don't want to wait for it but so many quote unquote exclusives like Quantum break or killer Instinct would also launch day one on PC which left very little reason to actually buy an Xbox I mean don't get me wrong as a consumer that primarily uses a PC I'm hardly complaining but it's certainly not a good look for Xbox themselves to hardly have any games that are actually exclusive to their console especially when huge mainstate franchises like Halo started to go on the decline by this era and frankly I think this one press conference in 20133 can probably be attributed to the main reason why the Xbox One utterly failed in comparison to its competition at least problems like the 360s Red Ring of Death issues were obviously accidental and issues like the ergonomics of the original Xbox controller probably just needed a little bit more testing and more markets but they were proud of the decisions they were making in 2013 which ironically enough meant that it was a lot harder to solve these problems than the legitimate mistakes they made in earlier generation because when you're making such massive brain dead mistakes Stakes like these it becomes clear that the people running the show have absolutely no idea what they're doing even when they did eventually stop bundling the connect and remove the always online DRM in response to the backlash people just didn't want to even associate with the console anymore the damage was done and they were just unable to recover for an entire generation selling less than half of what the PS4 did again despite how much insane momentum they had coming out of the 360 generation but yeah that pretty much brings us to the modern era with the Xbox series X and S and honestly it still feels like they're recovering from 2013 though at least they didn't bundle in a connect this time but they still are dealing with a lot of issues with things like not having a decent library of exclusives to actually give people a reason to buy the console so the Xbox is still trailing way behind Sony and Nintendo and the recent strategy seems to be to just keep buying Studios to hopefully have them make games for Xbox only to then close them down when it inevitably goes wrong because they clearly don't know how to actually manage game production to give them some credit they did start up Game Pass and that has been a pretty popular service on both consoles and PC but I have to say that I'm kind of skeptical of game pass's sustainability moving forwards it's one of those things that feels a little bit too good to be true when you think about it for too long and it's giving me serious Movie Pass Vibes if anyone remembers that like it only costs $10 a month while AAA games only continue to rise in price with many now being priced at $70 so so while Sony is sitting over here collecting 70 bucks of pop every time they put out a god of war or the last of us or whatever Xbox often just gets people to go to game pass for chump change instead and it just makes sense like why would I pay $60 to be disappointed by Starfield when I could just pay $10 instead it's hard to argue with getting that much disappointment per dollar and as long as I keep playing at least one or two games a year I can easily get my money's worth out of the service even if I go multiple months without touching it at all like I'm looking at these numbers and the math just ain't mathing and like I said at the start we just saw the closure of Tango Gameworks who just put out what was easily Microsoft's best game of 2023 with high-fi rush and I have a sneaking suspicion that it was due to Game Pass cannibalizing their own sales even if they get tons of new subscribers with these games games are so expensive that those subs need to last for months and months to actually make up the money afterwards and even then those sub fees are likely getting split between a number of different games that people are playing when they sign up so chances are that despite Hi-Fi Rush being a critical darling that everyone loved Xbox probably didn't make that much money off of it through no fault of the developers or the game itself and yet it's those developers that are having to pay the price for Xbox's mistakes and now they're in this awkward situation where they keep buying up these Studios to try and solve their lack of games problem but then they end up self- sabotaging by releasing everything on Game Pass where they inevitably make less money than they would have by just selling the games to directly which only prompts them to try and buy up more Studios and then the cycle just repeats so yeah now that we've done this big overview of the general history of Xbox I really feel like software has always been the big sticking point for them like I said at the beginning I I think that they really lucked out with buying the right studio for the Xbox and getting Halo as a major system seller to get their foot in the door and then with the 360 generation they basically didn't have to try it all to get people to make games for their console thanks to what was going on with the Wii in the PS3 of the time but as soon as they didn't have Bungie in the crutch of Halo propping them up anymore and they entered a generation where they were no longer the default Choice due to circumstance their lack of experience in managing actual games development really came to the Forefront and that is something that I think they still haven't managed to figure out over a decade later and they're really paying for it and I mean that quite literally as they seemingly just keep trying to throw money at the problem in the hopes that if they buy enough Studios it'll magically fix everything and to be fair I'm not saying that Microsoft is specifically ruining these Studios really more the opposite seems to be the problem a lot of developers that work under Microsoft now have commented that they're actually pretty hands off and often let developers keep doing what they're doing but the problem is that they often buy Studios that are going through some kind of rough patch like Bethesda with how both Redfield not Redfield redfall and Starfield were clearly having a very troubled development cycle and now blizzard and all the problems that they have going on and so by taking that very hands-off approach that also means that these Studios aren't actually getting nearly as much help as they need in order to succeed and look I'm also not saying that Microsoft is somehow unique in making massive mistakes in the game industry in this video alone I touched on Sega flunking out of the console Market Sony completely botching the launch of the PS3 despite the success of the PS2 Nintendo ruining an entire Generation by naming a console the Wii U and so on and so forth there have always been huge controversies with most of these major gaming companies going on at near all time so there's no shortage of morons at all of these companies but at the very least on a fundamental level at least Nintendo and Sony seem to understand that having a strong library of good games with Legacy developers is an incredibly important part of owning a gaming company meanwhile Microsoft seemingly doesn't know how to actually appeal to Gamers and manage game development Beyond just buying a studio and hoping that it just puts out a good game for them and that's kind of a big problem that should have been addressed decades ago well I'm glad to finally get that off my chest this has been something that I've thought about for a long time now and I just couldn't really hold it in anymore and I'm curious what you guys have to say about this as always I'm happy to continue the conversation down in the comments below I have a feeling that I'll probably have made a few Xbox Fanboys mad with this one but hey if you guys have some legitimate counterpoints and I'd be glad to hear them and if you agree with what I had to say today then by all means I'm curious if there's anything else you think Microsoft could be doing better with the Xbox brand and if you liked what you saw remember to leave me a like and if you want to see me make more videos like this make sure to subscribe and ring the bell so that you can get notified of when I make more videos like this in the future but for now thank you all for watching and I hope to see you all in the next one

Channel: Blaze

Views: 51,933

Keywords: Xbox, Microsoft, Studio Closures, Hi Fi Rush, Mass Layoffs, clueless

Id: RFj7r5WlfiU

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024