State of Xbox

 

I’ve been seeing some defenders of Xbox and Microsoft say that closing down the game studios whose games underperformed is the right thing to do.

I think this read of it infantilizes the executives and makes the people getting paid less than a percentage of what they make seem like they have real control. If an executive approves a game about a polar bear wielding samurai swords, then the executives will also make sure that their marketing department will launch proper support to sell the game, and their finance department allocate appropriate budget for the title based on market conditions and the expected timeframe the game will take to develop. The people making sure the polar bear can swing the samurai sword should not, at any point, be worrying about those other aspects.

Bad executive decisions tend to fail. Good ones don’t. There is more to being a game executive than micromanaging a game studio, in fact, if they are doing so, then that means they aren’t doing the rest of their job duties very well at all.

The mistake was not the games they released, the mistake was buying studios in the first place, only to realize you can’t afford them (if you can’t sell the games your studios make, then you can’t afford them).

The studio’s job is not to capture an audience, that’s marketing’s job, which is also under the executive. A studio being financially sound after development of a game is also not their job, that’s finance’s job, which is also under the executive. Both of those issues are the result of overspending and expecting unrealistic returns, which is also directly the executive’s job.

Remember, the studio has one job: to make the videogame. The executive oversees many, many things, including the studio.

These executives are choosing to layoff and close studios for the executive’s own incompetence and bad decisions.

For example, let’s look at historical examples of Nintendo: their executives had studios making games (Rareware making RC Pro Am 64 in 1990s, and EPD making Splatoon in the 2010s). They were games that those studios wanted to make. The executives read the market in 1996, and saw that RC Pro Am 64 would not give them the big holiday title they needed in 1997, so they had the studio rework the games into Diddy Kong Racing. They gave them appropriate budget and marketing to make this change, and the game was successful as a result of those decisions. In the second example, Splatoon was not an existing IP and was a new unproven thing; the executives read the market and considered the game the studio was making, and gave it the support it needed to work as it’s own thing. Splatoon came out, was a success, and now has a trilogy and a new single player spinoff on the way. The studios did their job: to make a good videogame. 

The executives did their jobs: to make the games succeed. Microsoft has a ton of amazing talent and studios making all kinds of amazing videogames, but their executives are not or can not make the decisions needed to make them succeed. And instead of fixing those issues, they choose to punish the studios instead. 

Absolute clown show of a company.