After Buying Up Studios, Xbox Says It Doesn't Have The Resources To Run Them

Capture and kill...
The only thing better than owning the competition, is putting them out of business.
So they buy studios that compete, fire all the workers, keep the IPs, and call it a day.
If we enforced anti-monoply laws this wouldn't be a thing. But monopolies dontate a lot of money to politicians so they say monopolies aren't a big deal.
- Parasites do be like that... I don't get how peasant class got so complacent though.
  
  Have you met our political system?
  Primaries literally don't have to be fair, because the results are nonbinding, the party can just pick someone else.
  And the people in charge keep loosening regulations so they can get bigger donations.
  They're openly running a PAC that coordinates with Biden and the DNC that individuals can legally donate a million a year.
  https://apnews.com/article/biden-2024-democrats-dnc-state-parties-ac8fba0ab1117ebf75cc16ebe0c735e4
  https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C00744946/
  Average Americans are being priced out of democracy by both parties. The candidate for both will be who the wealthy pick, and everyone will have to vote if they want to keep who they hate most out of office.
  If you're wealthy there's no way to lose, if you're the other 99.9% you can't win.
  Regular people can't out lobby Microsoft and Disney, and unless a progressive third party emerges the system will keep getting worse.
- People tried to block the Activision acquisition. Some were mocked for their attempt and some were mocked for their stance. It wasn't enforced because for all the attempts, it couldn't be proved which is more an indicator better definitions needed to be in place
- IPs
  "IP", here.
  
  Intellectual properties?
  
  IP UP we all P for IP

INVESTORS INVESTORS LOOK AT HOW MANY STUDIOS WE CAN BUY LOOK LOOK WE'RE SOOO PROFITABLE

WERE REMOVING SO MUCH DEAD WEIGHT INVESTORS LOOK WE'RE GOING TO BE SO PROFITABLE AFTER THIS
- Reduce the number of studios. The number of sold copies of games stays constant. Therefore, the money going to the remaining studios goes up.
  If the cost of purchasing the studio is less than the number of diverted sales, its in your interest to buy up and shut down competition. The only reason this math would change is if people exclusively purchased from the shut-down studios. And we all know why they don't.
  As a kicker, you can wring some extra cash out of old properties by turning them into shitty reskinned Pay2Win mobile games covered in the flesh mask of the old IP.
  
  Therefore, the money going to the remaining studios goes up.
  LOL
  People believe this shit? The money goes directly to some CX or some manegement asshole or chair or board or fucking whatever. What studios? What devs?
  
  Or license it to a third party studio who does a great job, puts out a quality product, then gets bought out and gutted.

Microsoft has been a fucking blight on gaming. Paid online, and timed exclusives both started there. No resale if we didn't throw a massive fit about it. Buying up studios to kill them. I mean Sony has their share of being fucks as well, but at least they're making good games. Microsoft has barely any decent games the last 2 generations, and hellblade 2 which is looking great was a Sony game that they had to buy and make exclusive.
- In a sane country there would be laws to prevent this monopoly shit.
  
  By next elections, it will be even more insane.
  
  In a sane country there would be laws to prevent this monopoly shit.
  The problem is that Microsoft is no monopoly in gaming.
- Tbf Microsoft is a blight, ful stop.
- They wanted to be the new Sony and Nintendo combined, but instead they're the new EA.
- Trying to force online only as well. That nearly killed an entire console generation for them.
- You say, "timed exclusives" as a negative meanwhile Nintendo dominates the market and never releases its exclusives.
- Microsoft has barely any decent games the last 2 generations
  I remember buying the XBox and only ever owning Halo for years, because the rest of the library was utter shit. Then Halo got too popular and Microsoft had to gut the talent and sell the husk for scraps.
- Source for the HB thing?
  
  HB 1 was a Sony exclusive initially. Launched on xbox later. Microsoft then bought the developer making 2 Xbox only.

its clear in hindsight that there needs to be more regulation to prevent buyouts of competitors and more protections for workers under buyouts/mergers such as paying workers for at least 3 years after the sale of a company.
- Why did you decide on the arbitrary number of three years? Why not ten years?
  
  3 gives people time to wrap up projects, move etc, basically any life most folks could have reasonably scheduled can be shifted in 3 years, it gives new parents time to take care of their kid and transition back to normal work. And the way to do it would be to have the companies pay the wages whether they lay them off or not (encouraging retraining rather than layoffs.)
  Although if what you wanted to do was was absolutely ruin the incentives that mergers create for layoffs the average appointment length of a CEO might do it.
  
  get bought out
  never show up for work again for a decade
  still getting paid
  😎

Microsoft is buying up companies to stockpile IP. Simple as that.
Then they have a lot of redundant workers so they let them go, leaving the IP in their hands to be filed away for potential lawsuits against infringers.
- It also reduces competition
  
  Unless and until new game studios start snapping up these suddenly out-of-work talent.
- Microsoft is buying up companies to stockpile IP. Simple as that.
  And then they do nothing with that.
  
  IP has value, we amass value. Are we missing a step? -stockholders
  
  Oh they can do worse than nothing. Their history is full of hold my beer and EEE.
  
  No one else can, either.

This exact method is how Microsoft became a giant in the first place. They've been doing it for longer than I live and they'll likely outlive me doing it.
- Simpsons did it.
  
  Lol this scene looks so old, and yet it still holds true
  
  Lmao accurate
- Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Market consolidation resulting in less of a desire to compete with innovation? Who would've thought.

Watch as they still milk them to death.
They cannot improve these games, give them meaningful updates or expansions. But they have killed many of their competitors and further monopolised the industry.
The second Microsoft gains a market majority in the gaming industry they will employ as many scummy tactics as possible to wring every cent out of people.
- Basically the old EA approach. They don't seem to realize that EA never restored their reputation from those days. But, I guess they don't care as long as they can show a line going ever upward for the shareholders.
  
  Restore... They are actively working to ensure I never buy another game again from there.
  Last bf was the last straw for me. I am out.
  Then they go and add anti cheat for bfv? I am a Linux gamer, fuck u.

they did this with the t-mobile sidekick... they bought the platform and all data outright... then 'oops! we lost all your end-user, cloud stored data, sorry! we were just too busy to do our jobs!'
thanks, microsoft.

The subscription model is, in my opinion, dumb. If they need it to work, maybe they should buy games instead of studios. I can't work out exactly how long term patching would work though, unless they kicked back a maintenance fee from sales and gamepass usage to the studio.
- Back in the day, devs used to not release games until they were done. Patches were bascially unheard of.
  
  What are you gonna do, mail out another set of floppies to everyone? Outrageous.
  
  I will say, these days it's more or less impossible to release a game that'll run perfectly on every system and it's a good thing we're able to fix crashes and patch issues as they come up. This has naturally had its downsides as publishers squeeze devs for tighter releases, but outside of that it's a very good thing for devs and players.
  
  It would be a bad look and there were anologue standards at play then. Digital releases and the capacity of storage mediums really pushed releasing unfinished games over the edge.
- I don’t know how the contracts look but games on Apple Arcade get support years after release. It does work somehow.
  
  It must work like the music streaming model where Apple kicks back a fee to the devs based on monthly installs or usage to the dev. It probably works better than Microsoft's model of buying a developer, not committing resources to run them, then closing the studio.

ah, yes, the highest market cap in history ($3T) doesn't have the resources
- Well, you see, they don't have cash on hand because they spent it on stock buybacks to boost that market cap

buy competitors and kill them. sounds good nice job

Seems like a cheap way to get rid of the competition.

THEN QUIT FUCKING BUYING THEM
- but then how else will they embrace, extend, and extinguish 🥺
  
  They skipped the extend this time lmao
- This need more upvotes

Stonks go up. The meat must grind. Also, everyone who's left is fired.

All MS want to produce are sequels to their tired franchises. Does anyone even buy Halo anymore?
- Halo wasn't even all that great to be honest. It was popular because it was an accessible, easy to play FPS on a console during a time when those types of games were mostly played on PC.
  
  That's certainly one of the takes of all time.
  
  No way dude. it revitalized the fps genre which was circling the drain at the time, and some ideas Halo had are still felt in fps games today.
  
  Halo under Bungie was pretty damn good.
  They were unique for that OG Xbox era of consoles, and although there were a lot of great games on the PS2, the one thing they sorely lacked was a really good FPS. Timesplitters was close, but Halo was where FPS first felt designed for a controller. The level design was on point as well, things like The Silent Cartographer still hold up now. It wasn't just a series of corridors.
  Other devs cracked it by the next gen, notably Infinity Ward, but back in that generation Halo stood alone.
  
  Totally agree! I remember being shuttled to the demo XBox by a GameStop employee who was fawning over the first Halo and I was not impressed having just finished Half Life 2
- I actually would buy halo remastered if it were a non-insane price. I would buy a copy for me and the friend i logged countless of hours of co-op with... but they won't sell it to us w/o making us buy a package with a ton of the other halo games wwe don't care about.
  So i guess i don't buy halo anymore either.
  
  The Halo remasters are a very reasonable price..?
  $40 for 5 games, regularly on sale for less (low of $10).
- No, we just play the free multiplayer.
  
  There are dozens of us! Dozens!
  Halo's problem with both 5 and Infinite seems to be the game eventually reaches a great point, but by then everyone has left for the most part, and with it having happened twice they're going to struggle getting people back for Infinite 2: Reclaimer Boogaloo or whatever they name it. Just give those passionate devs a longer leash and let them cook please.
- I lost interest around Halo 4. Making Cortana and Dr. Halsey turn into villains was dumb. Also, 4's forge mode was inferior to Reach's. Also, 4's environments were too bland, monotonous and grey. The earlier games worked in part due to the aesthetic variance from one level to the next.

Didn't Spencer say they weren't gonna lay anyone off or did I smoke way too much crack?
- I don't know but if he did say that and believed it, he might have smoked too much crack. This is capitalism.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Welcome to Microsoft.
- Yep, was here to say roughly the same thing.
  Buy up studios, Claim their IPs, shut them down to reduce the existing number of studios, and more importantly..properties, and thus competition.

I feel quite certain that this was the plan all along.
Shit like this should cause the purchased entity to revert to prior ownership without refund to the purchaser.

yEAh right

*pretends

Let them be free

I'm guessing they bought the IPs, not the studios. They already have studios.