Microsoft CEO Nadella Says Gaming Needs Good Margins To Innovate, Compares Strategy To Office (pcgamer.com) 46
The best way to innovate in gaming is to have good margins, that's according to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. He made the comments during an interview days after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft has expected unrealistic profit margins from its gaming division, which the report suggested was a likely reason for studio closures, game cancelations and thousands of layoffs at Xbox.
Nadella used the word "innovation" at least five times during the interview but never offered specifics about what he meant by it. He said Microsoft needs to "invent, maybe, some new interactive media" because gaming's competition is short-form video rather than other games. The CEO described Microsoft's new gaming strategy as being "everywhere, on every platform" after comparing the company's game publishing business to Microsoft Office. He said "the biggest gaming business is the Windows business" and added that he is looking forward to "the next console, the next PC gaming."
Nadella used the word "innovation" at least five times during the interview but never offered specifics about what he meant by it. He said Microsoft needs to "invent, maybe, some new interactive media" because gaming's competition is short-form video rather than other games. The CEO described Microsoft's new gaming strategy as being "everywhere, on every platform" after comparing the company's game publishing business to Microsoft Office. He said "the biggest gaming business is the Windows business" and added that he is looking forward to "the next console, the next PC gaming."
Clearly an idiot (Score:1, Offtopic)
Yes, he can generate short-term profits. But strategic thinking? None. An he does not understand creativity or solid engineering either.
Re: Clearly an idiot (Score:3)
He understands all of that, probably even better than you do. What he doesn't seem to understand is that gaming studios aren't tech companies any more than movie studios. The innovation comes from building better game engines and hardware.
Game studios these days pretty much don't do any of that. They're mostly focused on things like story telling, game assets (e.g. artwork, game behavior, levels, sound effects,) and game design. The technical side of that isn't far removed from the technical side of movie m
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He understands all of that, probably even better than you do.
Suure. Heard of the latest Azure outage?
Re: Clearly an idiot (Score:2)
Since when does knowledge make you immune from mistakes? Honestly you're killing your own credibility even more here.
Is he aware of the innovator's dilemma? (Score:5, Interesting)
"the very practices that lead to success, such as listening to customers and focusing on high-margin products, can prevent companies from adapting to new, lower-margin innovations that eventually overtake the market. "
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He's gotta leave us guessing because like other competitors MS has bought and killed countless studios and the games they produced.
He has it backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Find and fund some smaller development teams that are talented and have a unique idea for a game. It doesn't need to be a AAA game to have mass appeal and be a financial success. It will also cost a lot less if their game doesn't pan out.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You have to understand if you are producing a commodity or not and manage the business according. If you are in tech or entertainment; new novel products are where you bread is buttered.
To make new novel products, yes you need your current activities to be 'high-margin' but that does not mean the overall business is going to be high margin. If you plan to be long term; well you better re-invest those profits into trying new things; many of which will fail.
The other two options are - extraction. You reap
Re:He has it backwards (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, Nintendo has made their bread and butter on putting out "unique" blockbuster games, like each new Zelda iteration.
But frankly, most successful games are simply games that are fun to play. These deveopers lose sight of that.
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I tell you what, I avoid pretty much all big budget games these days. They're basically two of the same type: Either multiplayer points scoring where speed is everything or long winded story books where there's very little game play at all.
Innovation? (Score:3)
II, too, do not know what he means by "innovation." It sounds like standard CEO conference-speak blather to me. How do you "innovate" in gaming when your staff's top priority is clinging desperately to their jobs?
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Many breakout successes in gaming happened due to a platform change. Think AJAX from 2005, then social networks from 2008, then mobile from 2010.
Anything tried since -- VR, blockchain, smartwatch -- failed to gain traction so far. So yes he is looking for a new platform, in part because his company is losing ground on the PC and consoles. And he's also right about the tiktoks of the world eating games' breakfast, especially in the mobile part.
Personally I have high hopes about AR gaming, but the hardware is
Nadella (Score:2)
You have done more to screw the computing world than even Gates himself. Quite the accomplishment you fucktard.
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You have done more to screw the computing world than even Gates himself.
Microsoft need to die, if it eats itself from the inside that's ok by me. Satya is doing us all a favor.
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So.... I'm curious if you have difficulty tying your shoes because of the "woke DEI brainwashed masses".
Does "Everywhere on Every Platform" include Linux? (Score:2)
Good margins (Score:2)
Microsoft CEO Nadella Says Gaming Needs Good Margins To Innovate, ...
Okay... Like 1" all around or just letterboxing [wikipedia.org]? :-)
On no, not the ribbon [wikipedia.org]! :-O
Has he heard of indie games? (Score:1)
Indie games are able to innovate on a small budget and without worrying about margins.
Meanwhile Microsoft announced the 3rd or 4th remake of Halo...
"In order to get good games" (Score:2)
"You have to give me lots of money. Really."
Failed at the start (Score:3)
The moment you start talking about margins as a game studio is the same moment when you've failed. Your goal should be creating games that are immersive, complete, engaging and simply fun to play. Earning money should just be a consequence of you writing good games.
Don't get me wrong, I know earning money is important to keep going, but the moment you worry more about margins than you worry about fun, you shift your focus to the wrong thing and you will ultimately fail at both.
Re:Failed at the start (Score:5, Insightful)
The moment you start talking about margins as a game studio is the same moment when you've failed. Your goal should be creating games that are immersive, complete, engaging and simply fun to play. Earning money should just be a consequence of you writing good games.
Don't get me wrong, I know earning money is important to keep going, but the moment you worry more about margins than you worry about fun, you shift your focus to the wrong thing and you will ultimately fail at both.
The problem with a huge portion of our decision makers is that the sole focus is on profit and gaining profit. And for some strange reason, they aren't bright enough to put together that sometimes creating things that people want leads to profit. And sometimes, creating things people don't want leads to loss of profit. They become so laser focused on profit that they lose sight of the things that could lead to profit.
It's like when driving, or riding a motorcycle or bicycle, you do not want to do what my old motorcycle teacher called, "Target lock," where you focus on one point and never let your eyes move off that target. That's how you miss obstacles that may be utterly obvious if you remember to scan around you and keep situational awareness. But these folks go full target lock on profit, and in focusing so tightly on it, they miss the opportunity to improve their chances of actually reaching it.
Is xbox.com still down? (Score:1)
Office? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Microsoft Office is a terrible reference to pick, regardless as to my personal feelings, it's objectively, slow, bulky, lacks proper platform support, invasive with AI, and has a completely broken licensing system. If they want to innovate gaming, to make it like Office, just throw your game console in the trash, have someone kick you in the nuts, then demand payment for painkillers, and that might be a better overall experience.
That is pretty much the strategy.
Release a substandard product and force everyone to use it.
They've already achieved the former, cant see how they're going to achieve the latter as they had to use strong arm and monopolist practices to ensure that all other email clients were incompatible/unusable to make Office the de facto choice.
The XBox was supposed to "kill" gaming PCs every 2 years since it's release in the early 00s and yet PC gaming is the strongest and most profitable sector precisely bec
Innovative Products, Not Financial Instruments (Score:4, Insightful)
Others are accurately hammering this home and I feel compelled to pile on.
A company cannot be innovative if all of their innovative ideas require guarantees financial of success. If you lead with the demand of financial success, you're forcing people who are scared for their jobs to avoid risk and simply replicate the last big thing. And when the safe project brings in less revenue than originally estimated (because everyone is competing using the same safe items), they can point back at their market research and say, "We had all the reason and data to think that this would make us money."
Innovation is a gamble. If a company wants to be innovative, then they need to risk their own money on projects lacking the certainty of success and keep people employed despite the lack of extreme profit margins so that those people feel sufficiently comfortable to innovate.
People who are scared for their jobs will not innovate . "Firing people until innovation improves" is not a thing.
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Bzzt (Score:2)
.. more game-makers.
Kids, become a programmer. You can write games yourself, or you can join an existing project. There are many to choose from, but also, there's always room for one more.
Best game (Score:2)
I think that the best game ever is Minecraft. Not the vanilla one, and not entirely because of its creators, but because of those who write mods and modpacks for it. They get usually zero money from it, and I think this is why it works:
0. Some people write a framework, which makes writing mods easy.
1. A random person writes a good mod, e.g. Immersive Engineering that adds huge machines to the game.
2. Another person writes a mod that adds pollution. Similarly others write new simple mods.
3. Next person combi
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It seems mods are nowadays not only fun for the gamers, but essential to make a game work. Cities Skylines is an example, first edition is only really fun thanks to a lot of mods which not only add features but also fix or work around bugs and incompetent parts of the game which won't be addressed by the studio. Even after more than 10 years since release, I feel that game is still early access in its vanilla state. If I knew someone who could snatch a copy of the source code, I could at least see what I co
Good game design (Score:1)
Have a well-designed single-player campaign with a compelling story.
As Yahtzee Croshaw said about hi-fi rush "when they [Bethesda] throw out something like this with zero hype, it yodels to me that they've known what we really wanted all along; they know damn well what a fucking good game looks like.
Do they fear Nintendo?.. (Score:2)
The Switch 2 is perfectly capable of running the Master Chief Collection, Halo 5 and Halo Infinite, but they've gone radio silent on updating on all of those plans to "support the Switch."
So you have to ask the obvious question: do they fear Nintendo or something?
By current estimates, the Switch 2 has already globally sold about 10M units, and it's only been out since June. Therefore, there's no reason for them to act
What else (Score:2)
"Nadella used the word "innovation" at least five times during the interview but never offered specifics about what he meant by it."
He meant AI, Artificial Innovation.
Game innovation (Score:2)
Can anyone give me 5 innovations we can reasonably look forward to seeing in the next 5 years?
Actual innovations, not just improvements or incremental changes. Change the world innovation type stuff.
Innovation vs giving people what they want (Score:2)
What I want, games I would pay good money for, require zero innovation.
Here is a game I would pay $100 for: Gauntlet II
Let me be clear what this game needs. Arcade game Gauntlet II as a baseline reference. Same music/sound effects, same graphics, but 4K resolution. No new "whiz bang" shit ("improvements"). 4 player, network capability. Ability to create and join "parties" of up to 4 characters. Complete game stats of all kinds with ability to earn high scores on any of them. Tournaments. Some way of impleme
MICROS~1 innovation /s (Score:2)
It's furbys, all the way down (Score:2)
He means, whatever the AI says is popular. It's the purpose of spyware such as Recall and Co-pilot: They're the equivalent of the Funzo (furby) toy on The Simpsons.
Games must be Fun (Score:2)
The only innovation we care about is -- is the game fun to play? Does it challenge the player appropriately? Is it enshittified with microtransactions in a desperate attempt to squeeze money from the players? Sure, immersive games will be a blast to play -- when the technology improves over the next decade, and the hardware comes down in price in the next 20 years. I just want to have fun when I'm playing a game, not rack up more debt and fight my way through advertising -- which Satya Nadella added to the