At best, those once-reassuring quotes ring hollow today. At worst, they’re outright lies. We’ve come a long way from Xbox fans once proudly decreeing, “In Phil we trust” and posting photoshopped Dark Knight-esque “I believe in Phil Spencer” buttons.
Awfully, Bloomberg reports that Microsoft might not be done making cuts. So this may very well get worse before it gets better. For developers, that would mean further job losses. And for gamers, that reportedly might mean a(nother) possible Xbox Game Pass Ultimate price increase. So how did we get here? Why can’t Xbox stop tripping over its own feet? And with the Xbox organization growing so massive over the past half-decade and its reach extending not just to consoles but to any device capable of playing video games, can the soul of Xbox even be saved?
I spoke to two former longtime Xbox employees, separately, and both lamented the current state of the business. One told me, prior to this week’s awful studio closures, “I had lengthy conversations with a bunch of Xbox founders, and we all came to the same conclusion: it’s no longer Xbox, but Microsoft Gaming.” Ouch.
