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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Strangely I thought Phil Spencer was doing a lot of good for the Xbox brand, minus some of the recent price gouging.

He oversaw a lot of good things. Recently he's been in "admit defeat and dissolve the brand" mode. To me this has smelled like a "my hands are tied and someone above me is making bad decisions" path, but I don't have anything to justify that other than it doesn't make sense to absolutely fold when it's your name on the line and it's the brand you've spent your life building.

Sure, but they pretty conclusively lost, and it would likely require a major fumble by Sony to change that. So I'm not sure what they're supposed to do?

Loss is admitting defeat when you have a mature hardware team, decades of fans, and a brand that was born from, and reached its heights, from really connecting with what people want. That's fertile ground that got doused in salt. At some point you just have to admit that people don't want what they don't want. No reality distortion field will make people want crap games made without love bloated to the gills in microtransactions. Microsoft would rather shut the whole thing down than admit that though.

Was it really profitable when it was doing things fans did want? The original console was a massive loss and a mess because they didn't know what they were doing. The 360 gave them a few good years but in the end the ended the cycle in second place yet again. Afterwards it was years of being distant third. Will Microsoft ever recoup that investment? The only good years they had were because their competitor stumbled momentarily. How good was the brand when they never really made inroads into asia?

(I say all this as someone enamoured with the first console as it was a core moment of my upbringing)

Of course it was. The proof is in the pudding. You don't go from a skunkworks program to a major division without profit. Selling millions of consoles and games for hundreds of dollars with healthy margins is a printing press. The issue is while searching for making the printing press to have ever growing margins you squeeze the soul out of the product and make it so your customers leave. Optimizing for 3 months out kills you in 24 months. This is textbook enshittification. It is very obvious when it's happening and it should be very obvious when looked back on.

It was xbox yesterday, it's Windows today. Microsoft is on the way out.

I'm not so sure. Your comment is based on assumption that all they needed to do was launch the thing and then its free riding there. This is developing an entire platform we are talking about.

The original console cost a billion dollars to produce(confirmed in the documentary here: https://youtu.be/yT_i6hXf9WU?list=PL0il2l-B_WwadxfTkK3-NLoYN... ).

There are xbox engineers confirmed reading these forums so maybe some of them can shed some light but it seemed like the first console was a dud for multiple reasons and they killed it off early. Why would they do that if it was making money?

The second console was on its way to being a blockbuster until the RROD issue cost them at least a confirmed billion dollars in losses(also mentioned in the documentary here: https://youtu.be/z2d6IMBS8oY?list=PL0il2l-B_WwadxfTkK3-NLoYN... ).

So thats a confirmed negative two billion dollars and we haven't even talked about the cost to develop 360.

Sony caught up to them after RROD and managed to turn PS3 around so 360 didn't even end the cycle as number one in sales. After that, they never had any real success again and continued to fall further behind until today.

> So I'm not sure what they're supposed to do?

Continue to provide value and win over customers?

I certainly think he's good at branding but very poor execution during his reign.

Both Playstation and Nintendo Switch significantly exceeded xbox in terms of good games in the last decade imo.

It seems like Sony and Nintendo had more high-quality exclusives (though mostly timed exclusives for Sony), which are system sellers, while most Xbox games were also available on Windows.

But the Xbox hardware is good, franchises like Halo / Gears / Forza etc. have always been good, and Xbox Game Pass is great.

I wouldn't say he mismanaged but clearly his strategy wasn't working, although I'm not sure if there was a path to a better outcome.

The problem was the lack of hit IPs, and buying a bunch of studios with good histories like Bethesda was on the surface, a logical choice. The problem is that the Western AAA industry was also undergoing through a general decline amidst a larger cultural shift that was anathemic to originality, so no new hits could be made.

Nintendo and Sony in contrast still had a portfolio of more niche legacy studios like Monolith or Atlus or Kojima that could create new things. Obviously the talent for that does exist in the West, from Larian or smaller indie studios, but it is very hard for upper management to discern these kinds of details or be willing to take the risk with them.

He actually understood games, but somehow Xbox always seemed mismanaged.

The 360 era was good and they were really trying. For the last 10 years I don’t even know what Xbox stands for at this point. Like gamepass is a neat SaaS and the consoles are meh and PC gaming went it’s own way a long time ago and is at a healthy place

360 also benefited from PS3 issues (unusual architecture that was hard to program effectively, high price ). GamePass is great, and the Xbox hardware is good, but PS4 and PS5 had stronger timed exclusives while Switch had an appealing combination of Nintendo first-party exclusives (several of them rising from the ashes of the Wii U), lower cost, and handheld/hybrid operation.

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