'Xbox Is Not For Sale,' Says Microsoft's Gaming Chief (windowscentral.com) 66
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says Microsoft has no plans to sell the gaming business, telling The New York Times that "Xbox is not for sale" and that the company intends to take a long-term view. Windows Central reports: Microsoft's vast layoffs across the summer have hit Xbox in their thousands, with studios like Ninja Theory on the path to being closed, and others like Double Fine being divested completely. Microsoft has effectively shut down Halo Studios itself and handed off the franchise to Call of Duty showrunners instead, as Xbox aggressively seeks to restructure for its next decade.
[...] The NYT interviewed (paywall) Sharma recently covering the Xbox layoffs generally. The outlet said that Asha "did not stall" in declaring Xbox not-for-sale. "Xbox is not for sale. [...] We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that. [...] We've got a long way to go with Microsoft and we're going to take the long-term view."
The NYT quite patronizingly called the comment a "bob and weave" seemingly unwilling to let go of the idea of divestiture. It's great shareholder bait; Xbox has long been an aspirational type of product, and it has been a loss leader in some regards. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has remarked in the past about how, despite the fact Xbox isn't a huge profit generator, fandom of the brand has led to lucrative deals for Azure on the business side of things. Yet, shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead...
[...] The NYT interviewed (paywall) Sharma recently covering the Xbox layoffs generally. The outlet said that Asha "did not stall" in declaring Xbox not-for-sale. "Xbox is not for sale. [...] We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that. [...] We've got a long way to go with Microsoft and we're going to take the long-term view."
The NYT quite patronizingly called the comment a "bob and weave" seemingly unwilling to let go of the idea of divestiture. It's great shareholder bait; Xbox has long been an aspirational type of product, and it has been a loss leader in some regards. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has remarked in the past about how, despite the fact Xbox isn't a huge profit generator, fandom of the brand has led to lucrative deals for Azure on the business side of things. Yet, shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead...
Uh oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
That is what they always say right before announcing the sale.
"It's not for sale."
...
...
"Welcome to our new corporate owners."
"We couldn't tell you because the negotiations were under NDA."
Re:Uh oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
That is what they always say right before announcing the sale.
... or what one would say knowing that there are no bidders offering any substantial amount of money for that dead brand name, anyway.
Re:Uh oh! (Score:4, Interesting)
I think its implausible that it'd be for sale. The thing would be worth multiple tens of billions at the bare minimum because of all the game studios it owns AND a hardware division. Theres a LOT of IP in there.
But actually recoupinng any of that? Doubt it.
The XBox business just doesnt make a lot of sense.
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Dude the Epstein class has been routinely trading companies for tens of billions of dollars.
Yes we know the Epstein class love buying companies that lose literally billions of dollars. /s Please engage your brain.
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Xbox is like MSNBC.
Microsoft said they never made a dime from either one.
Re:Uh oh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes that's one scenario. The other scenario is that people say "It's not for sale." because of speculation that someone should buy it. That's been my own experience with my employer for years, we legitimately were not interested in a sale but media kept speculating on who would buy is *if we were*.
Looking to the specifics here: Xbox has a potential to make lots of money. They did in the past. It was just their very recent actions were fucking stupid and need a correction (it's unfortunate that those corrections is to fire studios, rather than to spin them off, it sucks when a corporation comes in buys something and then realises it wasn't a good idea and then rather than hitting Ctrl-Z, hits DEL instead).
Secondly who would buy Xbox in its current state? It's a money losing machine which would cause nothing but headaches. Buying things without a strategy to make a profit started this mess in the first place. I could see people willing to buy individual small studios, but not the cancerous behemoth that is the current xbox.
Re: Uh oh! (Score:2)
When did Xbox make lots of money? They were at least making a profit at one point but I don't remember it ever being large compared to revenues.
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Before Microsoft bought Activision. Gaming as a service combined with a loss leader hardware never has high profit compared to revenues. But at several points the gaming division was raking in more revenues than the OS division, and that before they saddled the division with the cost of interfering with game production that is costing them dearly now. The xbox division has been continuously profitable since 2005 until covid.
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I doubt Microsoft would sell Xbox.
There is too much synergy between the gaming division and the hosting & services divisions. They can eat their own dogfood by hosting Xbox games on Azure and managing accounts and subscriptions and stuff via Microsoft Services. Having internal customers for your core profit centers is good business.
And then there is the value of the gaming division itself. They have put a lot of money and effort into buying studios and IP. It has the potential to be a profit center
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The value I see in Xbox:
1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.
Frankly? I see 2 options.
AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buyin
Re: Uh oh! (Score:2)
I like your AMD idea. They would have good vertical integration there, of the most important and expensive components. Plus it would be a way for them to finally get some competent programmers.
But in order to really make it work they would have to go back into the RAM biz...
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We already know that Xboxes no longer sell... (Score:1)
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And the new PS5 Pro is $900. Fucking ridiculous, but not just XBox.
Windows needs XBox (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Windows needs XBox (Score:5, Insightful)
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Preeeeetty sure corporate lock-in is about ten thousand times more important to them than gamers.
Sounds like the number one now, so it will be number one to infinity and beyond argument.
Yes - for years, Microsoft has done whatever it wants, and even if the customers grumble, they will come back and take it. And for years they have. Will they forever? There is no questioning that W11 has become a very unstable OS. I've been bit several times, my students were bit so many times that they wanted me to teach the class using Linux. A couple migrated their programs to Mac.
So yes, I agree Microsoft wan
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Maybe they should look at why their gaming division is losing money, and try a different approach?
They just recently did. The layoffs aren't just for saving money. So far every studio with layoffs should have had mass terminations years ago.
Many of those studios became a joke. If you or I went to work and did not do our jobs for a decade, we would not have gotten the kind "layoff" label a decade later to collect unemployment with. We'd of been fired the same year we stopped doing anything.
The old xbox chief gave them far too much slack and did nothing about demanding results other than the equivalent of repeatedly sending strongly worded letters.
The new chief at least appears to be making a real and proper correction to their past mistakes. I guess time will tell if it's enough
Yeah - but I do understand corporatese. If the man says "Xbox is not for sale" - it means it is for sale. Just like when someone is in a bit of trouble, and teh Boss says, We're behind him 100 percent, the guy is gone the next morning.
Regardless, the gaming industry is in a bit of a kerfuffle at the moment. I'm a casual gamer, but can drop a few hundred on them - or at least I used to. I haven't bought a game in a couple years now. So Maybe games will get better if no one is making them any more? Get th
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Not a lot of games are Windows only anymore. If you ask me their only real advantage is inertia.
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Re:Windows needs XBox (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows' advantage over macos and linux is its rich fleet management software and its massive presence in large organizations. They've also got the fact that they're preinstalled on very nearly every laptop that isn't a mac or a chromebook. I wonder just what percentage of their userbase is gamers and whether it's north or south of 5%.
Re: Windows needs XBox (Score:2)
Yeah but Microsoft keeps making management worse, they add new things with no group policy support on the regular so you have to get into scripting to manage them anyway. Policy is great but only when they actually do the work.
Re:Windows needs XBox (Score:4, Insightful)
No it isn't. It's API stability. Linux changes stuff all the time, and pretty soon your old binaries won't run on new distros (unless, ironically, you're running Windows software with WINE). Apple deprecates APIs all the time and switches CPU every few years. For all its other faults, Windows is still better at keeping your software usable.
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No it isn't. It's API stability.
Too bad the operating System at present is not stable.
I know, I am still pissed off that My M4 Mac is better than my Intel Macs in every way. We need to go back to 286's this business of changing things has to stop. 8^/
You figure that inertia is going to hold 50 years from now? Also, there was a reason why my previous place kept a museum of windows and DOS machines. Because despite claims of stability, they aren't all that.
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Backwards compatibility has always been Windows biggest strength, and it biggest weakness.
Applications continue to work from version to version. Customers like this.
But it means not changing older infrastructure that the old applications need in order to run. Even when they have replaced older code, they had to implement a compatibility layer to allow the old applications to keep running. This meant not fixing some problems, because the fix would break certain programs that users rely on -older applicati
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Windows' real only advantage over macOS and Linux is its gaming audience.
That is an interesting take - and I think you are exactly right. Otherwise, most everything else is just inertia, the installed user base argument.
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Not for sale (Score:5, Funny)
"We can kill it off ourselves. Thanks anyway."
Tosses it on the pile of Zune, Bob, ME, OutLook, Clippy, IE, Cortana, ...
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"We can kill it off ourselves. Thanks anyway."
Tosses it on the pile of Zune, Bob, ME, OutLook, Clippy, IE, Cortana, ...
I came to post this but you did it well. Nice sense of history there.
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Oh noes! No more toilet paper. [wikipedia.org]
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Honestly, who would want Microsoft's XBox division? Isn't it losing money in the billions every quarter right now?
Other than the IP for their few remaining successful game franchises, there isn't much worth buying here. They would be lucky to get pennies on the dollar for all the money they invested into it over the past 10 years.
Geometry is dead (Score:2)
What will a 'Game Studio' be?
The era of parametric shapes and vertices and triangles and shaders will soon be done and gone.
Game views, and the scenarios themselves will be generated on the fly, by request,
rendered by some AI engine, to meet one's specific, custom view requirements.
Music and voice too. It will be the way it's all delivered.
Not yet, but soon. A way easier path to hyper-realism than having to model and light it all,
and as we've seen, that they can't do it today without requiring an Nvidia spa
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Yeah, AI is known for its efficiency and not needing a lot of Nvidia space heaters.
May I introduce the Apple Mac Studio? ;-)
"Apple Silicon M5 Max
Built for creators, developers, engineers, and all kinds of pros, M5 Max delivers exceptional performance and on-device AI compute. Edit high-resolution RAW stacks, compile massive codebases, push real-time 3D and motion graphics, and run large language models locally.
Apple Silicon M5 Ultra
M5 Ultra fuses two M5 Max chips into a single SoC — resulting in the most CPU cores of any Mac, the most powerful Apple silicon GPU ever, and our
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Yeah, because Apple is famous for their heat management!
Apple Silicon CPUs are specifically famous for that.
I once had to develop a Mac printer driver for our product on a Mac that kept overheating and shutting itself off... that was the Mac where everything was built into the monitor, with no fans, 'cause who needs fans, right?
You realize the Mac Studio has no integrated display, it has fans, and is carefully designed with cooling in mind. The Mac mini too.
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May I introduce the Apple Mac Studio? ;-)
That's a bold strategy Cotton - let's see how it works out... 8^) All joking aside, I have an M4 Mini, and it seriously hauls ass.
Apple Silicon M5 Ultra
M5 Ultra fuses two M5 Max chips into a single SoC — resulting in the most CPU cores of any Mac, the most powerful Apple silicon GPU ever, and our most capable chip for AI. Color-grade uncompressed 8K footage, perform computational fluid dynamics, and run frontier-class models on device — no cloud tokens needed.
Stop it! I'm drooling! Seriously though, I'd love to take a test ride in that. I don't do all that much heavy duty computing these days but it would be fun testing that beast out
Within the 7.7-inch-square enclosure lies a thermal system that allows Mac Studio to fly through intensive tasks at lightning-fast speeds. And even with all that power, it stays remarkably quiet, so you can process batch video renders or coding agent tasks without interrupting your focus."
That made for a flashback. My old G5 Mac - the one In that incredible aircraft aluminum case, sounded like a jet taking off while rendering 3-D animations.
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Yeah, everyone knows that times a million. That's not the point.
You have 100,000 PCs, each with a hot GPU vs. AI gen-ed from a load balanced server farm someplace.
All things being equal, and they're not, the AI generated stream experience would be superior,
infinitely customizable and scalable and reactive in ways beyond the design studio world's plans.
And contrary to some opinions, probably using way less power and way less dedicated hardware.
Like I said, we're not there yet, but it's possible and we've see
Geometry defines a scene, AI or no AI (Score:1)
Geometry is dead
Geometry defines a scene. Pixels are ultimately derived from some geometric scene description. Regardless of AI or no AI.
:-)
Perhaps you meant to say the scene geometry could be AI derived from a human natural language description?
That said, it would be fun to turn the descriptions from old text adventure games into images. AI generated illustrations. Maybe a new time and quality benchmark?.
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What I'm getting at is there will be modeling, lighting, and animating "by hand" like before.
Not that this would be the best example, but one of these systems should be able
to be shown a picture of some lake in a park, you can ask for a Mario and Master Chief scenario
and entities that act expectedly Mario and Halo-like appear in world, exhibiting their default behavior.
How long would it take to build that in Unity or Unreal?
Who would pay for it? (Score:2)
wait (Score:3)
shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead
Like the AI psychosis product industry isn't risky? Microsoft has nothing in that space worth mentioning. They have to buy or rent it like usual. Every time Microsoft buys something they immediately enshittify it, which they have done with a long long list of products which they turned into Windows features, most of which I thankfully cannot even remember anymore (Save, for some reason, Wolfpack -> WLBS. Weird.) and will not look up, thanks.
Maybe they could give gaming customers a discount if they'll let them use their power to run software on their consoles. I'm sure that would be a terrible idea on a lot of levels, so there should still be people who would go for it.
So xbox is for sale then! (Score:1)
So, it absolutely is! Got it. (Score:2, Interesting)
With the numbers their disastrous game launches have been getting, it would be surprising that replacing the head of xbox wont also include massive restructuring and then selling off a sinking asset before it is entirely worthless.
It seems in all their flying too woke to the sun, they forgot they need to sell products to stay afloat and the modernaudience does not buy video games, they just want to infiltrate and culturally-colonize a pre-existing community to dictate and push their messages.
So the question is - who is buying it? (Score:2)
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After that NEOM debacle, do they even have enough money leftover to buy it?
If they do, I'd imagine that they can get it on the cheap. That business is hemorrhaging cash, the only value there is a handful of tech patents and the IP for their few remaining successful game franchises. I would think that you could buy the whole division for just a few billion dollars at this point and then scrap it for parts.
Have their cake and eat it too? (Score:2)
Yet, shareholders would love nothing more than for Microsoft to quit the difficult and risky game industry to dive all-in on AI psychosis products instead...
Before I even read the part of the summary I just quoted, I was wondering if Microsoft was planning to let AI loose on game development. I could totally see them using LLMs to develop games, especially given that some hallucinations might actually be useful in that realm. Not to mention that game development might be a good - if also scary and dangerous - means of training AI for other purposes.
On an even scarier note, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Palantir is also training its military AI on games
Not for sale (Score:1)
Last two attempts to sell off Ninja Theory failed.
Good (Score:2)
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I worked with Booty when he was a team lead a long time ago at Midway/WMS. I don't remember what game or games he was working on. He probably learned from the mafia goons that ran WMS that regular gutting is the way to make sure people are working as hard as possible. March was the yearly culling time IIRC. WMS is still around after his leadership stint, but XBOX is a much bigger organization than a legacy game studio. I think he shaped XBOX sort of like he did WMS, with studios being acuired and managed li
Loss leader? (Score:3)
In order for Xbox to be a loss leader, it would have to be drawing people in to the platform.
But it isn't doing that any more, people only use Windows due to inertia and because it's bundled with the hardware they bought. And that bundling is anticompetitive because it's arranged through the usual coercion, where the computer companies can't afford to stop buying the licenses.
Windows games have a slight effect on loyalty for home users, but they don't really matter so much to Microsoft any more. Windows is less than 10% of their income now, just like gaming GPUs are [way] less than 10% of Nvidia's revenues* so Microsoft doesn't actually care about the desktop very much in general. As well, the home desktop is no longer important to their control of the corporate desktop, because of lock-in. They don't need familiarity at home, so they really don't care about home users.
* This was true before the circular financing. You might reasonably argue that their doing that cancels out their enterprise GPU profits since they're not getting that money back... but if you don't, then gaming revenue is just noise.
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Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.
I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).
There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems l
Yeah, but why not? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.
Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.
As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.
What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.
There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.
blame Amy Hood (Score:1)
Microsoft adopted the "battlin' business units" corporate strategy which works fine for a time (there are low-hanging fruit that increase profits without making things much worse) but after a couple years the products have to become much worse. Remember when Microsoft Edge integrated buy-now-pay-later because it would make them a couple bucks?
Anyway the current leadership of MSFT, if you can call it that, has no global plan for the company so the BBU approach will continue. If you're not in Azure or 365 the
Right (Score:2)
"Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says Microsoft has no plans to sell the gaming business, telling The New York Times that "Xbox is not for sale" and that the company intends to sell the gaming business "as fast as it fucking can."
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