Xbox Boss Tells Employees Microsoft Has No Plans To Stop Making Consoles (ign.com) 97
Amid increasing speculation about the future of Xbox, its exclusives, and even its status as a hardware manufacturer, Phil Spencer reportedly told employees last week that it has no plans to stop making consoles. From a report: Reporter Shannon Liao said in her weekly Substack industry newsletter that Spencer moved to reassure staff during an all-hands meeting on Tuesday. "The company held an internal Tuesday townhall where Spencer told employees that there were no plans to stop making consoles, and that Xboxes would continue to be part of a strategy that involves multiple kinds of devices," Liao reported.
Welp that's it (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never had a CEO reassure everybody like this and not immediately start lobbing off heads.
I guess it's possible this talk of multi-platform games is just a smoke screen to get the FCC off their back. But their CEO has never liked the XBox division.
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I was here to said the same. If a CEO said that is not dead, it is because it dead next week. :-)
If Slashdot give fake internet point, I will give it to you
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Well... I guess that they still need to make those rack mounted XBoxes that they use in XCloud. Those technically count as "consoles", right?
They seem pretty hell bent on getting all of their clients to use those instead of buying a new console by including cloud streaming as part of the XBox Game Pass.
Re:Welp that's it (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if it's quite that cut and dried... but yeah. The CEO would obviously say the same thing regardless of what their actual long term plans are. The last thing he wants is for valuable employees to start jumping ship on their own - he wants them to stay until he is ready to throw them overboard.
Re:Welp that's it (Score:5, Insightful)
he wants them to stay until he exercises his stock options.
FTFY
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There are no CEO that can see beyond next quarter.
Many startups, unicorns, and others run losses for years before turning a profit.
Amazon is an obvious example.
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Again, Amazon is an obvious counter-example.
Amazon had a huge market cap and employed hundreds of thousands before it reached consistent profitability.
Google and Facebook also had years of losses before turning profitable.
Re: Welp that's it (Score:2)
CEOs on "growth" sectors only need to worry about the next quarter's market cap, not profitability.
This is not entirely cynical self-interest - if they are truly in the "growth" phase and not in a mature industry rebranded with a company logo and stock buybacks.
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A better phrasing might be "there are damn few CEOs of publicly traded companies who are getting paid to see beyond next quarter".
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There are no CEO that can see beyond next quarter.
Some can, but I don't know if any of them infest..., er, I mean, work with large tech companies. Too much influence from the MBAs has hewn all of their brains into "quarter profits" seekers. Anything that makes profits next quarter is golden, regardless if it's long-term suicide or not.
Re:Welp that's it (Score:4, Informative)
What the fuck are you talking about? He came on in 2014.
Stock price in 2014 - $44
Stock price today: $415
Market Cap in 2014 - $330B
Market Cap today - $3.09T
Earnings in 2014 - $16B
Earnings in 2021 - $82B
What, exactly, leads you to think he's "a short-sighted idiot slowly destroying the company"?
https://www.macrotrends.net/st... [macrotrends.net]
By almost any measure, right down to earnings per share, the company has been doing just fine under his tenure. Certainly vastly better than his predecessor.
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So you're saying, basically, "Just you wait and see." Well, I suppose I can't argue with that.
Re:Welp that's it (Score:4, Funny)
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Oh, bugger off. "If you don't agree then (insert insult X)..." is fundamentally low brow discourse. Up your game, please.
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My apologies. I actually considered the idea that you might be forming a sarcastic response, but it wasn't clear. Could be read both ways.
"You can go eat a dick, shit-breath."
I'll pass. But... if you're gonna be subtle, be better at it, turd-brain. :)
All in good fun.
Re:Welp that's it (Score:5, Funny)
All cloud, all the time
Microsoft is a highly diversified company. The cloud is only part of what it does.
But when the ride ends, what's Microsoft going to do?
Microsoft will adapt, as it has many times in the past.
eventually the whole thing collapses.
If you think you're smarter than the market consensus, you can short MSFT and get rich.
Be sure to come back here and post a photo of your yacht.
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If you think you're smarter than the market consensus, you can short MSFT and get rich.
Be sure to come back here and post a photo of your yacht.
The rest of your post is quite good. However, this part is incorrect. One of the very first principles of investing is that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I'm not making any statements about whether or not there is a good short case for MSFT. I don't follow the company well enough to know. But just because you recognize a structural problem doesn't mean you can predict when that problem will manifest in lower stock prices. Shorting is a high-risk investment strategy n
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One of the very first principles of investing is that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Case in point is that while it has dropped in recent times Tesla still has a "market cap" of over $600B making it still the "largest" car company on Earth.
Been hearing about the day the Tesla short holders are gonna cash in but has that happened yet?
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Perhaps the Tesla shorties are early, but it is also possible that they are simply wrong. At least that's what the market thinks.
Tesla has a big lead in EVs (except in China) and is also ahead on SDCs, which may be a very lucrative market. Tesla already charges a hefty premium for the FSD package.
I'm not betting against them.
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it is also possible that they are simply wrong. At least that's what the market thinks.
Thus the quote on the market staying irrational. Fact is by all "rational" measure's they are correct right now about Tesla but the irrational bit is the holders staying on for the future and the hype.
Tesla is successful no doubt about it but there are no current metrics on earth that support a $600B market cap. Not revenue, not vehichles shipped, surely not self driving as everyone in the space seems to be getting gapped more and more by Waymo every year that passes.
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https://www.nasdaq.com/market-... [nasdaq.com]
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My company, and pretty much all companies I work with still use Windows and MS Office. And despite some awesome work by Valve, PC gaming is still more or less synonymous with Windows gaming. And I mean, they have something like a 80% market share for desktop OSes, and if you take away Macs, that's something like 95%.
And they have cloud services like Azure, they are on top of the game when it comes to AI, they have a very significant social network with LinkedIn. And they have GitHub, and I mean, in the 90s,
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The CEO isn't destroying the company, but getting back to the topic of XBOX.
How much of that growth is attributed to XBOX vs Azure / O365?
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You don't x10 your market cap by delivering stuff from a decade ago.
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You don't say?
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/0... [cnbc.com].
When Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as Microsoft
CEO in February 2014, the software company was mired in mediocrity. Its market cap was just over $300 billion.
A decade later, Microsoft’s valuation has swelled tenfold, to $3.06 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable public company, ahead of Apple
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I mean it's OK to have that opinion, but your original comment is dead wrong. Unless of course you were originally talking about Phil Spencer?
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The original Xbox launched in 2001. They had a window of about a year around 2009 where the Xbox division was profitable, and that was partly due to an accounting trick in how they handled the warranty issues on the Xbox 360. They went back to losing money once development on the Xbox One started, and continued losing money until late in the Xbox One lifecycle. It gets blurry after that, as they stopped reporting Xbox separately of other gaming revenue sources. PS5 has been drastically outselling Xbox Serie
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Yep, it would be very interesting to see what ChatGPT tells a person about the future of the xbox brand based on the latest CEO statement.
Re:Welp that's it (Score:5, Interesting)
I could see this working out that XBox as a "console" in the traditional sense is over.
My longshot hypothesis, Microsoft is going to launch the next "XBox" as another attempt to what Valve did with the SteamBox, as in a pre-packaged PC only in this case it will run Windows and will have a console style front end like Big-Picture-Mode and basically for most people they will only interact with XBox Gamepass for their games.
This means developers only have to target "PC" but meet minimum performance specs for that particular model of PC.
This double dips since MS is already pretty much the only game in town (Outside SteamDeck/Proton) for PC gaming and this forces Sony into being the odd duck out (even though Playstation is on x86 already) for developers.
Probably wrong but hey, we're speculating here right?
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Oh Oh Oh, almost forgot
Scenario two (probably more likely) the new XBox is just a thin client and MS want's you to *only* interact with GamePass streaming, IE, "Google failed with Stadia but where they failed we succeed"
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Oh Oh Oh, almost forgot
Scenario two (probably more likely) the new XBox is just a thin client and MS want's you to *only* interact with GamePass streaming, IE, "Google failed with Stadia but where they failed we succeed"
Why not? They're attempting to do the same thing with the PC.
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For sure, it's just a way way harder sell on PC as it's pretty trivial to buy games from a number of stores, the customer base is more wary of streaming services over purchases and you still have to fight 800lb PC gorilla in Valve/Steam so it's a far more competitive market.
Steambox/Stadia seems like they fell into the middling failure pile in that they didn't do either things better than the originals; not as plug and play simple as a console, not as customizable and free as a PC (no storefronts, no mod su
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Oh Oh Oh, almost forgot
Scenario two (probably more likely) the new XBox is just a thin client and MS want's you to *only* interact with GamePass streaming, IE, "Google failed with Stadia but where they failed we succeed"
Why not? They're attempting to do the same thing with the PC.
Erm... Attempting? as in present tense?
Do we not remember the failure that was OnLive?
Every few years a big company thinks it has the magic solution to on demand gaming only to find out it has exactly the same problem as every other sevice before it (notably input lag). I think it's Sony's turn to find out next. Microsoft will keep trying to extend the life of its current console as long as it can and release a new one, they've too much of a back catalouge to switch archtecture now.
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The "skinned PC" plan seems more likely to me; I don't think they'd conclude that the time is now for a network-only console.
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I think the console hardware is going away, but Xbox will remain a brand for gaming. You have Microsoft owned studios will be publishing under the Xbox brand, and you'll be seeing games on Steam with Xbox branding.
I can see Microsoft licensing the Steam Deck from Valve, putting on "XboxOS" instead of SteamOS and promoting that.
I mean, basically all the Xbox exclusives are now on PC (at least the Microsoft published ones) so really why would I buy an Xbox version when I can buy it on Steam and play it on my
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I can see Microsoft licensing the Steam Deck from Valve, putting on "XboxOS" instead of SteamOS and promoting that.
Oh that is very spicy, I like that idea. It's an interesting conundrum if that happens though if Microsoft exits the console market since they probably wouldn't really, just that specific type of console. I bet your idea of XBoxOS isn't that far off and we see their own device under the Surface line.
Would Sony come under regulation after that? There's still Nintendo and technically all of the PC market still. I don't think Sony has to sell MS open it's own store on PlayStation so long as they didn't disc
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Is there any advantage (other than price) of a dedicated console? If you are go
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Is there any advantage (other than price) of a dedicated console?
Price is still a big one and It's less relevant today than in yesterday but there is the simple point of ease of use. You don't generally have to worry about if your specs are up to performance, the games are generally stable as developers still have to target just 1 or two revisions for performance on a console and generally "it just works". You hook it up to your TV, plug it in, get it online, pay your taskmasters the $80 a year and bam, you can play all the latest games all your friends are playing rig
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This sounds completely believable to me. The problem is, I don't know whether to compliment you on a nice bit of forecasting or perform a massive Picardian facepalm!
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Microsoft doesn't make any money off of Steam
Of course they do, they just don't make as much as if they sold on their own store. It's a business calculation to decide to engage in that market and it obviously makes sense since Steam is by far the largest storefront for PC games so they reach a huge market by doing it. It's also 2024 and there is more income streams to games than the initial purchase price.
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Why would they make a cut? They're the publisher, they're making the 70% after the cut
There's no reason to believe this yet (Score:4, Interesting)
What almost everyone in the comments here is ignoring is that the XBox is a cheap, plug and play Windows gaming box. It pads Windows's stats. It expands the reach of Windows in the home market. It also makes a lot of money. Microsoft has every reason to keep going and trying to make it right. Dominating Windows game distribution through the XBox brand and pushing Steam back is how they make a cut on every game sold to run on Windows.
Nadella is not stupid. He is far savvier than Ballmer or Gates. The company has massively expanded under his watch. If anything, I suspect he will keep the hardware division around as a loss leader just to not cede the market to Valve.
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What almost everyone in the comments here is ignoring is that the XBox is a cheap, plug and play Windows gaming box. It pads Windows's stats. It expands the reach of Windows in the home market. It also makes a lot of money. Microsoft has every reason to keep going and trying to make it right. Dominating Windows game distribution through the XBox brand and pushing Steam back is how they make a cut on every game sold to run on Windows.
Between Valve and Microsoft, I would say Valve has done far more to make sure my PC games run on every one of my PCs through the years than Microsoft especially older games. Case in point, I had the original Fallout and Fallout 2 games and played them on my Windows 98 machines. Years and many PCs later, I came across the discs in a box I forgot about. I thought it might be fun to play them again. They would not install even when I used Windows 98 compatibility mode. The error message suggested an outdated D
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It pads Windows's stats.
It does not. Windows stats are not affected by Xbox, they are reported separately. Windows versions do not correlate with xbox versions either so even when Windows stats are broken down xbox would have to be listed separately, and they aren't listed at all because they are fundamentally different products. Fun fact: They are run by fundamentally different divisions in Microsoft.
The only areas where the divisions combine is with Gamepass where total subscriptions aren't separated between Windows vs Xbox play
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CEOs, politicians... whenever they say they won't do something bad, it's already finalized [youtube.com].
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I have never had a CEO reassure everybody like this and not immediately start lobbing off heads.
That's quite a visual. I mean, the image of a CEO lopping off heads is pretty common; dude with an axe or a guillotine, you know. But lobbing off? So, like, he's grabbing peoples' heads and throwing them so hard they come off? But "lobbing" is a casual kind of throw, so I guess he's such a monster, so physically powerful, that when he grabs your head and gives it a casual toss it rips loose. Maybe taking the spine with it, Mortal Kombat style.
Or it could be a typo. But that's boring.
What's a 'console'? (Score:2)
Before you admonish, perhaps it's best we ask the obvious; What's a 'console'?
I mean we kinda have to nowadays, since a few too many love to re-define terms until they feel better.
What's the difference from PS# (Score:2)
We're done innovating with consoles, the world has already done that. PlayStations also have little change other than a version number, and only version number compatibility or season-based game updates (think sports that move something each season) cause you to buy a title you already have.
Now, what's the difference? XBox uses the HD-DVD spec, PlayStation of course uses BluRay. This was the knockout blow in the Hollywood war over the formats meaning nobody is printing movies on HD-DVD, but XBox games are u
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The Xbox hasn't supported HD-DVD since the 360 era, and even that was only with the purchase of an add-on.
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We're done innovating with consoles, the world has already done that.
I don't know, Nintendo keeps surprising on this front. I never would have thought there would be as much demand for a console that doubles as a portable system but here we are today with the Switch being a hit and selling far more than the Wi U ever did.
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Wii U was a pretty big flop. The Wii was a hit, but the GameCube before it was a flopped. Even the N64 was outsold by the PS1 3-to-1.
Nintendo has always been more successful with its mobile systems. The DS outsold the Wii. The GBA outsold the N64 and Gamecube. The GameBoy outsold the NES and SNES.
You can look at the Wii as being a console that can also be mobile, or as a mobile system that can also be attached to a TV. If you take the latter view, then Nintendo was essentially giving up on the home co
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Yeah, not buying what you're selling in regards to the Wii.
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And for good reason. That's a typo, should've said Switch there. "You can look at the Switch as being a console that can also be mobile."
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Ah, that's fair and definitely makes more sense. I know I make plenty of typos myself.
Usage numbers for the Switch certainly support your conclusion as well https://www.digitaltrends.com/... [digitaltrends.com]. although I've only ever used mine's mobile ability when traveling and even then mostly just on the plane as I dont go on vacation to play video games.
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They also offer Nintendo made games which are only ever available on Nintendo systems. If you make fun games people will play them even if they dont visually look like the must cutting edge stuff.
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Nintendo is throwing gimmicks into their consoles and hope that eventually one sticks. Quite frankly, they are sub-par consoles when it comes to specs and sell on the gimmick factor. That works for party game consoles and for some handhelds, but for anything more "serious", that's just a joke.
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Nintendo's sell first and foremost because of the games as they have always been one of the best developers in the world. High system specs are certainly nice but people play games based on whether they are fun or not, not because one looks visually better than the other. Nintendo realized quite some time ago that they didnt have to keep up hardware wise as long as people enjoyed their games.
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uh, What's GNM? Bing seems to think is stands for German New Medicine.
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Playstation 5 has been such a wonderful change from Xbox it's not even funny. No more ads all the time everywhere. The 'save that last x minutes to video' is snappy and works reliably where Xbox always had a 30 second hang in the UI. The games are better - God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Spiderman, and there's a ton more. Back in the Day MS had Gears of War, Mass Effect, and a bunch of others but today they got squat.
The CONTROLLERS! Oh My God the controllers are leaps and bounds better than XBox. The t
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PlayStation tried TV service under the name PlayStation Vue, but eventually shut that down as non-profitable.
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Xbox tried HD-DVD with an external drive for the Xbox 360 in 2006 and cancelled it shortly after. I don't think any games used it, it was just for video discs. The Xbox One and later models use Blu-Ray (or no optical drive at all)... the One X and Series X support UHD Blu-Ray video discs, unlike the Playstation.
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We're done innovating with consoles
Consoles haven't been innovative since the PS3.
Now, what's the difference? XBox uses the HD-DVD spec
Xbox hasn't used HD-DVD since the 360 days. The Xbox One used a normal Blu-ray. Your information is multiple generations out of date.
I expect XBox making to be spun off.
Why? What's the financial incentive to do so? The company doesn't care what you think it likes or doesn't like. And it sure as heck seems your own personal view is based on incorrect information as well.
Yes, make a NVidea 4070 based x-box (Score:1)
M$ make a tonne of money off xbox (Score:1)
M$ make a tonne of money off xbox, there recent acquisitions have been in gaming, they have been investing in future revenue streams from gaming, they are not going to suddenly pack it in and say "We don't like making all that profit, so we're going to can the xbox".
Boss advice (Score:2)
Xbox Boss Tells Employees Microsoft Has No Plans To Stop Making Consoles
Don't fall for it, it's a trick. This Boss is very hard to beat.
However, over at xboxtopwalkthroughs.com, they give tips on how to defeat him. First: don't fall for his traps like this apparent career reassurance. Second: stay to the back of the conference room and always try to hit him from the side. Keep moving and never let him fix his laser pointer on you. Make sure you have plenty of ammo; it takes dozens of hits to finally finish him off.