Xbox Missed The Wake Up Call With Baldur's Gate 3

[Applause] ladies and Gentlemen please welcome Phil Spencer you know just as I was sitting around thinking to myself what am I going to talk about next Xbox has quite honestly the biggest leak we've ever seen in gaming history and I realize by now you've probably already listened to other YouTubers or you've already seen articles or tweets or something related to it however I have some really unique perspectives on some things that people aren't really paying attention to and I want to talk to you guys about those today because there's a lot of really consumer unfriendly practices that are being hinted at in here and we need to talk about that and also what they said about Baldur's Gate 3. in the recent leaks coming from the FTC meeting regarding the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Xbox an internal conversation between Phil Spencer and marketing Chief officers Chris capacella and Takashi numoto stated Takashi I totally agree that Nintendo is the prime asset for us in gaming and today gaming is our most likely path to Consumer relevance I've had numerous conversations with the LT of Nintendo about tighter collaboration and feel of any U.S company would have a chance with Nintendo we are probably in the best position the unfortunate or fortunate for Nintendo situation is that Nintendo is sitting on a big pile of cash they have a board of directors that until recently has not pushed for further increase in market growth or stock appreciation I say until recently as our former Microsoft Board of director member valve act has been heavily acquiring shares of Nintendo and I've kept in touch with Mason morphett as he's been acquiring it's likely he will be pushing for more Nintendo stock which could create opportunities for us without a catalyst I don't see an angle in the near term for a mutually agreeable merger of Nintendo and Microsoft and I don't think a hostile action would be a good move so we are playing the long game but our board of directors has seen the full write-up on Nintendo and valve and they are fully supportive of either if opportunity arises as am I the email finishes with I love this discussion and value you looking at opportunities here at some point getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies it's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off their own Hardware a long time smiley face guys I'm going to be honest with you this actually disgusts me and the reason why is because a lot of people one don't really understand the implications of this and how bad it is for consumers but beyond that there's people that are actually cheering this on they think that this is a good thing and that's something we really need to talk about you have Phil Spencer literally outing himself saying they basically already have somebody on the board and another person that's aggressively buying shares this is insanely ruthless the fact that we have people that are cheering on Xbox wanting to acquire Nintendo even just thinking about it whether or not it's even realistic for them to do it in the first place and thinking it's a good thing perceiving value for themselves and they don't even see the costs while exclusive content can benefit some customers too much exclusivity with no competition hurts everybody in the end it forces customers to buy specific Hardware or subscribe to Services just to be able to access their favorite games limiting customer choice with the massive consolidation we've already seen across the entire gaming Market the potential to remove a direct competitor like a Nintendo reduces competition permanently the gaming industry already has an impossible barrier to entry only steam deck is the only competitor to enter into the mainstream scene with some relative success and they already had their own platform on PC less competition means less incentives for companies to innovate in the future or even offer competitive pricing fewer choices for consumers would ultimately mean in higher prices and lower quality games and services competition is what breeds better games if there's no competition you have no need to innovate no need to make a better product and when you can cut out the competition down to one competitor those companies Now set the price and will likely follow one another's pricing because it benefits them both to do so this is something that we've already seen that's blatantly out of control with internet and cable providers also another key issue that a lot of people don't seem to pay attention to is changes in corporate priorities the goals and priorities of a company are going to change over time and sometimes that's going to change after an acquisition which can directly affect the products and services of that company and what they actually offer to you this could be potentially alienating for existing customers if their preferences aren't aligned with new corporate strategies if your favorite game Studio doesn't align with the company's strategies you don't get your favorite game anymore in a hellscape parallel Dimension where Xbox actually did acquire larion Studios like they intended to at one point we likely wouldn't even have gotten Baldur's Gate 3 because it wasn't a game that they were actually even interested in as shown in the emails later on in this video Phil Spencer and buy extension Xbox even entertaining the idea of wanting to buy Nintendo regardless of how realistic it is or not shows a complete lack of concern for the customer for us and that means a lot because that means that they don't care about us having freedom of choice at the products that we want to pick now I realize that some people are going to say well I love Xbox I've had an Xbox Xbox 360 Xbox One Etc but at one point in time what if they stop making products that you enjoy if they have less competition they're not inclined to give you better games we're not going to get better games as a result of a purchase like this that's not how something like this works especially when you're taking that much competition out of the market you're consolidating that much at that point they would be so much bigger than PlayStation that buying a PlayStation wouldn't even make any sense either which means they would potentially stop making consoles they would just sell their games to Xbox and again Fanboys are probably sitting there going yeah that's a great thing no that means that there's only one console which means they have full pricing control they have full control of what kind of content and what quality of content that you get that's not something that you want we need competition that's how the free market works in the first place that's the beautiful thing about the free market if I don't like your services or products I can go to someone else and when you start losing money and you realize that your customers are turning away and going to somewhere else you turn around and go man you know what I should probably look to see how I can fix things what makes this a lot worse is if you look at their aggressive consolidation or their desire for more aggressive consolidation in the context of future consoles all these console refreshes and the future console they plan on making lack disk drives and while I realized that games today aren't even really contained on the disc that we purchase many PC games are just digital downloads now but eliminating the physical option entirely means we quite literally will have no ownership over the games that we are buying we may own access to it however as we saw with the Ubisoft debacle last year where they shut down online services to multiple games that even moving access to DLC under these terms of services that we're signing outlined in many of the different end user agreements that are for every single game that we play we don't own anything at all digital downloads used to be a convenience now they're just a means to remove our rights of ownership and pay overpriced one-time rental fees look I actually enjoy the conveniences of things like Game Pass I've been a subscriber to it ever since the service ever existed I've been an Xbox owner ever since the original Xbox but I'm starting to question that at this point but the thing is we have to think about how limiting this technology can be limiting subscription services or digital downloads can be when I go and I take my gaming laptop and I want to go hop on a plane I still have to log into Xbox log into Game Pass to be able to play those games in the first place even if they're games that I've actually purchased and then downloaded on that system if my internet goes out at my house if that laptop is the one that's marked I can't play stuff on my Xbox I can't play it on my desktop PC I have to specifically play it on that one device because you're only allowed to mark one device for offline play that just doesn't feel good beyond that we have to think about what the road map is what's the end goal for Xbox and the end goal for Xbox is to eventually get people off of Hardware because that's where they're going to be able to maximize their profits the most see consoles are lost leaders the less Hardware they have to provide us the more money they can make in the end to be honest if they could just have everybody on Game Pass nobody buying games or owning a console that's perfect for them because that means everybody's streaming off of xcloud that means they're using all the computers that are within Microsoft servers which are computers they're already writing off to begin with none of this really benefits the customer outside of some convenience all we do is just continue to lose ownership this is something that I brought up in my Baldur's Gate wake-up call video was that a lot of these companies are so profit focus they're so profit incentivized that they've completely lost the plot on how to actually provide good services or good games to the customer they're providing less and less value to us to the point where they can't even recognize value anymore with all the leaks a list of games and their priority for Game Pass showed that Baldur's Gate 3 barely made the list ranking it as low as the likes of Just Dance and they called it quote a second run stadia pcrpg basically that the game held no value to them and that they didn't really see it being successful enough for Game Pass what's even more eye-opening is that they ranked the upcoming controversial Suicide Squad looter shooter as high priority in comparison and I already know what everyone is saying even larion's head of publishing tweeted out saying in their defense so did everyone else same as Divinity original sin 2 comes with the genre and the way we approach things and the way we execute things there just isn't any existing data that could have told anyone how Baldur's Gate 3 was going to perform we just had to take giant spooky leaps and he's not wrong larion's head Sven vinka told his it team that there would barely be a hundred thousand players concurrent players at Max on launch grossly underestimating the 875 000 concurrent players the game would see at its peak it's a niche game I understand it it's a niche genre I understand that as well but regardless this is a game that pushed the industry forward whether people want to admit it or not this is a game without a shadow of a doubt and I don't think anybody can fight me on this that has pushed performance capture specifically to unknown bounds I will never be able to look at companions or other NPCs the same way after playing Baldur's Gate 3. it feels like I'm actually conversing with real people and that feels incredible it is Xbox's responsibility to evaluate these games to know what these games are they have intimate relationships with these developers intimate relationships with these products far before they're ever in our hands they are the ones that are supposed to be catching lightning in a bottle back in May when this list was made I made a video on this channel one of my very first videos that I ever made and it was talking about how Baldur's Gate 3 will surprise you you guys can go watch that video I'll link it down below it's one of my first videos it's kind of embarrassing but in that video I talk about all of the things that everybody loves about Baldur's Gate 3 today if I could recognize it then why couldn't they oh that's right it's because they're far too focused on profit incentives they're far too focused on the equipment they're far too focused on cloud gaming and on Game Pass to actually be able to see valuable games that provide valuable experiences to the player because we are not the priority in my video Baldur's Gate 3 was a wake-up call I specifically called out Xbox I said that they encapsulate everything that's going wrong with the gaming market today they are so tied up with wanting to compete with Sony and Nintendo in the console hardware and bolster their subscription services that they can't even recognize good games anymore they let Halo become an afterthought they lit redfall release in the state that it did and rather than fix the issues that they have internally with some of these other Studios all they want to do is just buy up more companies and force players into buying games directly from them regardless of their quality it's all about how they deliver games how many games that they deliver not what games they are delivering this feels like ancient history at this point but this was all confirmed back in May Phil Spencer was on the kind of funny games podcast and he said we want the Xbox Community to feel awesome but the idea that if we just focused on great games on our console that somehow we're just going to win the console race doesn't relate to the reality of most people like ninety percent of the people every year who walk into a retailer and buy a console are already a member of one of three ecosystems and their Digital Library is there this is the first generation where big games they're playing were games that were available last generation when you think about fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft their continuity from generation to generation is so strong and while this might be true that there are many gamers that are playing games like Minecraft and Roblox or they're participating in Live service games well the reason why they're not being pulled off of those games is because a lot of these companies a lot of these console makers that own a lot of these first party titles aren't making games that are Innovative or pulling a lot of those players away from those games in the first place if XBox continued the momentum that they had during the Xbox 360 era and didn't go to try to make the ultimate multimedia platform with the Xbox One or dig a shallow grave by trying to put all of their focus on the connect or now all of their focus on Game Pass they might not actually be in this position in the first place but they don't believe that great games is the solution to their problem they believe that consolidation and services are the solution to their problem well that might be the solution for them but it's definitely not the solution for me I don't want them buying any more companies I don't want them buying Nintendo I don't even really want them buying Activision Blizzard I'm tired of a lot of these companies consolidating we're already seeing the effects of that with 10 cent and embracer group shutting down Studios left and right because they change their corporate directives sorry the studio is not working out anymore even though it might be a franchise or an IP holder of a game that you always love sorry they're just not in the cards we don't think it's going to sell well enough this is the future that we look forward to if these companies continue to do this if we don't push back and talk about these kind of things and I know there's a lot of people that I see Pop Up in comment sections or on Twitter or wherever else that talk about the futility of us having these conversations there is no futility in us talking about these kind of things if anything we should be enraged we should be talking about them because if we don't then we're complacent and then we're just sitting here and we're just waiting for them to make the next move and that's just not the kind of life I want to live that's not the channel That I want to have I want to talk about these things and I'm going to and I'm going to continue to do so in the future anyway I hope you guys enjoyed the video I feel like I got a little bit fired up on this one but this just really grinded my gears this is just not something that I want to see and I used to hold a lot of respect for Xbox I used to really like Phil Spencer and I even saw that he posted a tweet where he's talking about how how hurtful it is to see his team's emails talked about like this and the reason why I feel so hurtful is because it's a mask off situation we see you for what you are you're not the gamer on our side anymore maybe you were at one point but you're not today and you probably won't be ever again anyway thanks for watching the video subscribe to the channel if you guys haven't check me out on Twitch subscribe to the Discord drop a comment stay cool stay righteous stay safe and I will not see you on Xbox

Channel: Legendary Drops

Views: 63,070

Keywords: Baldur's Gate 3, baldur's gate 3 gameplay, baldur's gate 3 review, baldurs gate 3, baldur's gate 3 обзор, baldur's gate 3 story, балдурс гейт 3, baldur's gate 3 прохождение, baldur's gate 3 ps5, baldurs gate 3 gameplay, baldurs gate 3 review, bg3, baldurs gate, baldur's gate, larian studios, baldurs gate 3 classes, baldurs gate 3 ps5, baldurs gate 3 pc, baldur's gate iii, baldurs gate iii, bg3 review, bg3 classes, bg3 gameplay, Xbox, Xbox leak, Phil Spencer, Xbox FTC

Id: qDU4UpObdhs

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023