He's getting rewarded for building a toxic, fratboy workspace, sexually and psycologically harassing women.
I wonder if Microsoft can be held accountable for allowing a sex predator like him to continue working.
Keeping employees around for the sake of keeping them around is just bad business. A 1% layoff isn't a cost cutting exercise, it's just organisational reshuffling. Employee churn is a fact of life, no need to get too hung up over it. The optics might be not great, but that doesn't really matter.
This guy should have walked away with nothing instead.
It would have been nice if Microsoft gave him incentive to ride off into the sunset immediately as much as he doesn't deserve it.
What hurts way more at scale is the increasing monopolistic power of Microsoft Games. That should be the primary focus of everyone's attention.
This weakens Sony, Nintendo, Steam, Epic. The consumer. Everyone but Microsoft.
Microsoft can give away "experiences" under-cost and sink a lot of human attention into it. That translates to opportunity cost will be spent in the machine rather than distributed economies of innovation.
When they acquired Bethesda, a similar concern was brought up. Fast-forward to today, new Bethesda games aren't releasing on Sony consoles. It started with Starfield. TES6 won't release on PS either.
Also, you can just look at all the non exclusive games Microsoft has.
Microsoft has never been #1 in gaming. It's always been playing catch-up.
There's nothing even remotely close to "monopolistic". That doesn't make any sense at all. You literally can't be a monopoly if you're not #1.
This is Microsoft simply trying to complete better against Sony. Which is a good thing. It benefits the consumer as stronger, more equal competition leads to lower prices for consumers.
Letting Sony remain in the lead forever is what would be bad for consumers in the long term.
If Microsoft want to strengthen competition, they would stop burning their first party studios to the ground.
Playstation has tons of exclusive titles. By one estimate, 4x as many as Xbox [1].
How is that a fair playing field?
I'm personally totally in favor of ending exclusivity entirely for all consoles. (What gamer wouldn't be?) But as long as Sony is playing that game, Microsoft is simply trying to level the playing field here, to make Xbox more competitive against PS.
That's what more competition is.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/face-off/ps5-vs-xbox-series-x-excl...
Microsoft endorsed enshittification and got complacent. Sony didn’t.
Microsoft lost their previously winning position through incompetence in a single console generation, and that doesn’t all of a sudden make buying up and making several studios exclusive “fair competition”.
“Fair competition” is not using your other business lines to subsidize harming consumers because you made several years of terrible decisions.
What’s more, Microsoft’s throwing money around to just buy a position in the gaming market is showing through clear review manipulation (Starfalls wall of 10s for what’s clearly a 5-6/10).
For any other company this purchase is viewed as anti-competitive. Microsoft’s arguments were fucking toddler level. How consumer protections managed to bungle this so badly to prevent the sale is likely to go down in law education for “what not to do”. All the lawyers involved in the consumer protection side should be disbarred on the basis of complete incompetence.
I can name a few that are definitely relevant: Uncharted, Horizon, God of War, The Last of Us, titles that are also being released for PC. They are no longer exclusives.
The consoles today don’t have identical catalogs. That’s where your argument falls apart. One company made a decade of bad decisions which caused them to fall behind.
In a fair market where Microsoft didn’t have trillions in resources to just steal the market, Phil Spencer would be fired and Xbox gaming would be looking for better direction.
Also, Microsoft was granted moving forward on the basis that their claim “the games would be more accessible to everyone” was true. Yet you are here arguing that this will not be the case. Which is it? We all know what Microsoft plans are.
Personally, I am now hoping for Sony and Nintendo to pick up major publishers and make the content exclusive just so I can see the Xbox fanboys lose their shit over how its anti-competitive when they lose games, but not anti-competitive when they rob experiences from others.
It's not "stealing" anything. It's acquiring a company and paying a fair price for it.
Playstation has way more exclusives than Xbox. This is just getting closer to leveling the playing field. There's nothing wrong with that. The more equal in size major market participants are, the better off it tends to be for consumers.
And please don't call anyone "fanboys". That kind of name-calling isn't appropriate for HN discourse.
> Xbox is preparing to join other major games publishers in raising the prices of its major new first-party titles from $60 to $70. https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-raising-prices-new-fi...
GamePass is $10.99/mo.
If that's not lowering prices, then I don't know what is.
The Xbox Series S has cheaper hardware, that's why it's cheaper. You might as well say video games are getting less expensive because the 3DS isn't $500.
While GamePass is great value, it's just temporary to keep everybody on Microsoft store. You can't mod games, you can't open your game files even, and your progress in live service games will not be transferred to other platforms even if you're on PC still.
It's hard not to acknowledge the fact that Microsoft is getting perfectly positioned to clamp everyone down into their ecosystem harder than ever, and there's nothing we could do about it. They have Github, they have a close partnership with ChatGPT, they have a crazy amount of game studios and IPs.
I don't think the attitude of "let's let them get as big as possible and hope they don't abuse that power" is healthy.
No we're not, we're talking about the total cost of console gaming, because that's what actually matters when you're discussing the effect on consumers.
> It's hard not to acknowledge the fact that Microsoft is getting perfectly positioned to clamp everyone down into their ecosystem harder than ever
No, it's hard to imagine where you're getting that from at all, if you're talking about their gaming arm. Microsoft isn't positioned to clamp down on anything in gaming. They're simply trying to compete against their more successful competitor Sony.
> I don't think the attitude of "let's let them get as big as possible and hope they don't abuse that power" is healthy.
I don't think the attitude of "let Sony's gaming business be as big as it already is, but don't allow Microsoft's gaming business to try to expand to match Sony's" is healthy. That's literally anti-competitive.
- Microsoft dwarfs Sony as a company, so I don't know why you're painting them as an underdog with their back against the wall.
- The amount of gaming IP Microsoft owns also dwarfs Sony. The concern is not that one or the other will make things exclusive but that the options of who game developers can work for will get smaller, which makes unionization harder, which makes our games shittier.
> No we're not, we're talking about the total cost of console gaming, because that's what actually matters when you're discussing the effect on consumers.
The poster you responded to was talking about gaming prices. That's great if you can save a hundred dollars buying a cheaper console though.
> No, it's hard to imagine where you're getting that from at all.
From all the things I said, and in addition, Microsoft pretty much having it's hand in every pot in the world (Even WHO).
> They're simply trying to compete against their more successful competitor Sony.
> I don't think the attitude of "let Sony's gaming business be as big as it already is
...How big do you think Sony is? You vastly overestimate how worried Microsoft is about Sony. Activision is as big a publisher as Sony and Microsoft just bought them.
Of course it's a console war thing, it's always been a console war thing. That's literally the definition of the market we're talking about here.
What the rest of Microsoft's business does, or the rest of Sony's business does, outside of gaming, has nothing to do with anything here. Buying Activision isn't helping Microsoft with Office 365, nor is Office going to bring people to Call of Duty. The same as having "The Last of Us" as a PS exclusive isn't helping Sony sell cameras or TV's.
Edit: I mean, if you think Microsoft ought to be forced to spin off its Xbox division as a totally separate company, as part of breaking up the tech giants into 50 different companies, then that's a totally different conversation, and Activision is neither here nor there.
But as long as we're accepting that Microsoft is allowed to compete in gaming in the first place, then purchasing Activision is simply what it needs to be allowed to do in order to compete fairly against Sony.
I'm not calling your position embarrassing, I'm calling the position you think I have embarrassing. What's uncalled for is reducing what I'm saying to this
> I don't think the attitude of "let Sony's gaming business be as big as it already is, but don't allow Microsoft's gaming business to try to expand to match Sony's" is healthy. That's literally anti-competitive.
And then getting pissy when I point out that you tried to make it sound like I'm some shill for Sony. I'm literally in other parts of this thread also criticizing Sony. The reality is you're saying untrue, uneducated things about the state of the gaming market. Again Microsoft is already much bigger than Sony's gaming market. Christ, Activison is almost as big as Sony's gaming market.
> What the rest of Microsoft's business does, or the rest of Sony's business does, outside of gaming, has nothing to do with anything here.
Again, Microsoft > Microsoft Gaming > Sony Gaming.
And why would we pretend other parts of Microsofts business don't exist just because Sony isn't also doing it?
Who has their operating system on billions of computers, where they can sell games?
Who has the best capacity to use AI in their businesses? AI is the next step for effective anticheat, which is otherwise a losing battle.
Who is the only feasible steward of the language that lots of games are developed on?
Who owns LinkedIn, where game developers look for jobs?
Who owns the highest selling game ever and has already filled it with microtransactions, essentially printing money?
I don't see how we can ignore any of those things. I look at all of this and it's alarming how fucked we are if Microsoft decides to make all our lives worse, and that's just in gaming. The worst Sony could do has already been done cause Sony are shitheels in their own way.
This is where you're wrong.
Microsoft gaming is around $15B in revenue per year. They sold 8.6 million Xboxes in 2022.
Sony gaming is around $30B in revenue per year. They sold 19 million Playstations in 2022.
Sony gaming is literally twice as big. Which is why it's fine for Microsoft to compete. (And see my edit in my previous comment.)
And please stop calling names or implying them. I'm not getting "pissy" and I've certainly never suggested you're a "shill". I'm done replying, because I have no interest in participating in a conversation with language like that.
You put words in my mouth and then got bothered when I pointed it out. If you want to argue with yourself be my guest
Nintendo refuses to do anything that makes them NOT a hardware company, and so they will continue to languish on last-generation hardware.
Steam is doing just fine. Microsoft sells games on Steam because it made business sense for them to do so.
Epic has good first party titles but they give away two games a week and it has never moved the needle for me because (a) Steam games are the same price, and (b) I've already got most of my games on Steam, so why would I move?
Nintendo does not consider Microsoft and Sony to be competitors. What they absolutely do not want to do is operate like the other guys, who have quite varied interests because the companies are not 100% focused on gaming.
It's hard to argue with Nintendo's staying power. Of course, their methodology is not always consumer friendly.
Microsoft could fix this problem, but they decided to enact vengeance against Sony for Call of Duty.
Does Activision not have HR policies? If I sexually harassed my co-workers, you could bet I wouldn't get a golden parachute.
As a shareholder since 1999 my cost basis for my shares in ATVI is about $1.11 - Exiting at 95.00.
Pretty good return TBH.
That’s really just the beginning of it, Kotick is quite a prolific pos himself: https://nypost.com/2021/11/16/activision-ceo-threatened-to-h.... And he’s alleged to have covered up sexual assault at the company, which given the Epstein connections… tracks.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10314430-i-ve-known-jeff-ep...
Might want to check your sources