Zynga Confirms Xbox Head Don Mattrick As New CEO
allthingsd.com
allthingsd.com
While it hasn't shown so lately, Don does come from a grassroots background in gaming as a former 17 year old co-founder and programmer of Distinctive Software in 1982. His company was acquired by EA which likely put him on the path to executive level success. A kind of exit that some founders dream about.
It's easy to make a judgement and discredit or target him but I do believe he has genuine passion for gaming and hopefully he can infuse some of that in a place like Zynga.
However: Not a very good technical leader, extremely isolated from the troops (even the principal ones who are designing the new products) which badly affected direction and morale, and very bad at messaging (which I suspect is the /real/ reason he's going).
Of course, what replaces him could be worse.
Was not he the guy who pushed for Kinect? I am not aware much about MS's internal politics but the timeline seems to match.
If so, then the real reason, in my humble opinion, is this: Microsoft is now about to fight for the 8th generation with an underpowered yet $100 more expensive console.
This is strange though, Windows 8 launches and Sinofsky is gone. Then Xbox One set to launch and Mattrick goes.
I am far from impressed by Mattrick's legacy within Microsoft. He clearly failed to differentiate their offering vs Sony.
It seems that the market has very clearly differentiated Microsoft's offering from Sony's, but for all the wrong reasons from Microsoft's perspective.
Moreover, people really liked Don. He was a leader that the division really rallied behind, and Xbox had its first profitable year under him. I'm excited to see what he can do with Zynga. I do find the transition a bit ironic due to his history at EA and EA's newly formed rivalry with Zynga.
I strongly believe that Bach was forced out after the incidents with Courier and the Kin. In the same suit, I have a deep suspicion that Mattrick also felt the heat from the Xbox One debacles. Best of luck to him in his new role.
Ha. You don't remember Distinctive Software I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinctive_Software#Notable_g...
A company specialized in (not so good) ports on virtually anything they could port stuff on. There were tons of companies doing ports at the time, and Distinctive Software wasn't the best one, that's for sure.
Importing someone who comes from "real" gaming seems like a good move in this regard. Hopefully this means Zynga intends to move towards "fun games with microtransactions" and away from "pretty one-armed bandits with microtransactions".
Microsoft's gaming division has become the definition a "pretty one-armed bandit with microtransactions", and no doubt thanks to Mattrick.
Yeah, what assholes, instead they made it so you don't have to screw around with physical media and can instead share your games with 10 of your friends around the world without having to deal with a disc.
Also, they just removed that update fee.
Besides, bitching about the Xbox One's distribution model is kinda overdone at this point.
Well, to be fair, there was nothing really concrete about their plans. And now that they've changed their minds they can talk big about how awesome it would have been. But I seriously doubt the end result would have amazing as everyone claimed it would have been.
It's not Microsoft's fault that reddit blew up in a circle-jerk of misinformation. Granted, they could have marketed it better and made that story clearer.
reddit circle-jerk of misinformation
I'll post this again, from an interview taken on June 10th.
[Phil] Spencer: But we're also trying to launch and we understand feature sets. We've got partners and publishers [we] want to talk to about how lending is going to work. We don't dictate pricing to our partners on our platform. We want to give them capabilities to support content and business models that they want to support with their content. It sounds like Sony is trying to do the same thing. How do we support what our partners want to do? We want to have the conversations with them and land on a plan.
We understand lending and the benefits of lending, so, funny videos aside, we get it. We want to make sure we land on the right solution that fits a digital ecosystem moving forward.
If you think about lending in digital ecosystems, it's not something a lot of other people have supported. We're going to commit... gifting, we said we're going to support that, secondary market we're going to support that even though the license is digital and it's not as trivial as just handing a disc to someone else. Lending, we want to do it, we want to work with our partners to make it possible.
Kotaku: You understand, obviously, that because these things exist on discs, it's why it seems so odd that—you're not launching until November—since I would think I can lend you this notebook and discs, surely I could do the same, but you guys are saying that you won't have the lending solution.
Spencer: We don't have a lending solution today.
Kotaku: You might have one?
Spencer: We don't have a path... I don't want to make a commitment to somebody without a plan of record on how that lands. I could over-promise, under-deliver on the features. I don't want to do that. I want to make sure. I understand how gifting is going to work. I understand how the secondary market is going to work.
From Phil Spencer's own mouth, sharing was never an actual feature of the XBox One.
>Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One.
That's a concrete statement from MS and one they made numerous times. And they more or less say "yes, we don't care who the 10 people actually are".
I mean, come on, did we both read the same block of text? It is extremely explicit at the end about being physical lending.
And again, Spencer was talking about "lending in a digital ecosystem." The thing Microsoft did not have concrete plans for. Yes, he mentioned they have a plan for gifting games, they have a plan for reselling games, but he contrasted this with the difficulty of, and their lack of plan for lending games.
Yeah I guess it's moot now, but at this point I always interpret a lack of specifics when talking about a product as marketing speak. We have fact sheets, we have plenty of discreet, unambiguous information of other features; when somebody goes out of the way to hype up a feature of a product while painstakingly avoiding concrete, verifiable information about said feature, and verifiable information about said feature doesn't appear in the previously mentioned fact sheets, I assume the feature doesn't actually exist yet. Especially when an executive goes on to literally say the feature doesn't exist.
Still. I mean, this is what they published to the world as their official feature list: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:s-KgYAn... before they published the update in response to the butthurt backlash.
"Give your family access to your entire games library anytime, anywhere: Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One. Just like today, a family member can play your copy of Forza Motorsport at a friend’s house. Only now, they will see not just Forza, but all of your shared games. You can always play your games, and any one of your family members can be playing from your shared library at a given time."
Gamasutra has an interesting article up about that very subject: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/1949...
I wonder what this means for Zynga - more DRM?
I could very much imagine the whole mess costing him a lot within MS and leading to him looking to go somewhere else and start over.
This was his decision. With a lot of outside pressure, certainly, but it was up to him.