Phil Spencer has spearheaded the growth of Xbox for the last few years and has steered the company in a specific direction that others may find concerning, however, what is more, concerning are his views of the state of video games and the entertainment industry. Spencer is a businessman deep beneath his core, and his perception of gaming as an organism that generates money has been called pure hypocrisy. He seemingly blames capitalism as the bane of growth. While Xbox is not generally doing so well in terms of console gaming, Spencer shifted his focus to a different and far more experimental strategy that relies on cloud gaming. Microsoft’s impressive budget was also utilized accordingly given Spencer’s aggressive acquisition spree of various game developers with the potential to help grow the brand and maybe improve the industry.
  • dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de
    30·
    7 months ago

    Wow, that’s one of the worst-written articles I’ve seen in a while. It almost feels like a comment on something that we aren’t shown. Almost every sentence is missing essential context. When did he say that? In what context? Can we get a direct quote?

    That being said, the head of one of the biggest console manufacturers and gaming publishers in the world blaming capitalism for the state of gaming is a true selfawarewolf.

    Edit: PC Gamer has an article that’s a bit more readable. Seems like Spencer sees the problem (investors value growth over everything else) and goes to the wrong conclusion (he needs to find a new way to grow his department).

    The real problem is greed. These days, it’s not enough for a business to be profitable. For the guys on Wall Street, it needs to be even more profitable than last year. That goes so far that an old employer of mine complained not that they had lost money, not that they had not grown but that they had grown less than the year before and therefore all teams had to cut down on spending. To them, everything less than exponential growth is unacceptable and nobody even considers that the market is finite.

    • samwise@beehaw.org
      7·
      7 months ago

      Wow, that’s one of the worst-written articles I’ve seen in a while. It almost feels like a comment on something that we aren’t shown. Almost every sentence is missing essential context. When did he say that? In what context? Can we get a direct quote?

      This article is absolutely just AI blogspam. A lot of words that say absolutely nothing.

      The real problem is greed. These days, it’s not enough for a business to be profitable. For the guys on Wall Street, it needs to be even more profitable than last year. That goes so far that an old employer of mine complained not that they had lost money, not that they had not grown but that they had grown less than the year before and therefore all teams had to cut down on spending. To them, everything less than exponential growth is unacceptable and nobody even considers that the market is finite.

      It’s absolutely unsustainable, and it’s destroying the entire industry (well, destroying everything else too, but here specifically for this discussion). Companies keep cranking out more incremental changes to their hardware that do not need them. Developers keep pushing out bigger and bigger and bigger games that cost more and more, chewing up and spitting out creative teams, burying players in predatory microtransactions and subscription fees that no one wants nor asked for. All so shareholders can make a few more bucks this quarter.

      I just keep going back to that meme of “I want shorter games, with worse graphics, made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.” And they would make a killing with that if they’d do it. But they won’t because it doesn’t sound greedy enough to investors.