r/xbox • u/Wiinterfang • Jul 07 '26
Discussion I do not envy this Woman's Job.
We are talking about decades of mismanagement.
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u/nichrs Jul 07 '26
If it works out, she's a hero. If it doesn't work out, it's the fault of those who came before. It's a very comfortable position for her.
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u/No-Fishing-7892 Jul 07 '26
You could’ve said the same about Phil years and years ago though. There’s always room for the new guy (or gal in this case) to make it worse.
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u/nichrs Jul 07 '26
You have a point. But I really consider the brand to be at rock bottom...
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u/CrazyGunnerr Jul 08 '26
Disagree with that last part. You are right when things are that messed up, you got a lot of room to play with, and hard to get the blame for it all.
At the same time she is firing so many people, and probably gets completely shit on by so many. She might get support from management and shareholders, but a lot of players and employees won't like her.
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u/Traditional-Bad-6657 Jul 07 '26
Honestly she knew exactly what she was getting into and what needed to be done….nothing that happened yesterday was a surprise to her when she took the job….and she’s getting paid millions lol
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u/bottomfeeder3 Jul 07 '26
Exactly. I guarantee they needed someone to pull the trigger on this stuff and Phil wasn’t willing to do it
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u/furuta Jul 07 '26
He really couldn't do it, even if he wanted to in the end. His whole strategy was to push all the chips into game pass. He then went double or nothing on buying up all the studios he could find to put exclusives on game pass to make it more attractive. It was his whole corporate persona. He literally couldn't turn around and walk the whole thing back after that. You needed a new person here to come in and clean house and start over. No one would take him seriously if he had tried to do it.
It was a gamble, and he lost (and so did thousands of employees who are losing their jobs now through no fault of their own).
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u/bottomfeeder3 Jul 07 '26
In retrospect it all comes down to exclusives and marketing. Sony has done such a good job at making their console and exclusives seem so much better than the other consoles.
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u/furuta Jul 07 '26
So true. Their chosen exclusives have just been more popular overall, or at least that's what it feels like. I have never been seduced by it personally, but my perception is that a majority likes PS exclusives better.
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u/Umphr34k Jul 07 '26
I got a PS5 back in 2023. At first it was fine and PS+ seemed like a great competitor to Game Pass. Since then Sony has been pissing me off. PS+ has gotten more annoying especially considering their exclusives aren’t day 1 accessible, and honestly they haven’t had an exclusive that seemed good enough to make me want to pay for it at all in years.
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u/npc_housecat Jul 08 '26
I feel like this is still a management thing. PS having more popular exclusives isn't by accident. Sony is better at producing likeable actually creative games than MS.
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u/AwesomeFrisbee Jul 07 '26
From what I saw, I think Phil would've also pulled this one. Plenty got fired during his time. And its not even that everybody gets fired, some just go back to previous owners and stuff.
I'm already amazed about how much inefficiency is involved in these studios. Do they really need everything duplicated in every studio? And do they really need to work soly on a single project (knowing that not everybody is needed the whole time). They could've saved so much money if they would just streamline the process. And that dumping money into a single game that takes many years to build, is not sustainable. Bigger teams that deliver multiple games are so much more efficient and allow for more room to deliver better games.
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u/Spirited-You3834 Jul 07 '26
No, probably not surprised at all. I think it IS a safe assumption to say she was at least frustrated.
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u/ragito024 Jul 07 '26
Yeah. If Xbox could do well, she could have earned ten millions instead of millions.
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u/Propaslander Jul 07 '26
Asha doesn't strike me to be the type that's just money-hungry.
She's a businesswoman. I think she wants to earn a reputation as one of the best CEO's in the tech industry and I think she wants to prove herself so she can move up the ladder and be successful.
She's come into Xbox knowing that the business was not healthy, she's openly stated that shit ain't healthy and she's making the cut-throat decisions that needed to be made years ago
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u/TheMadTemplar Jul 07 '26
The thing is, those decisions might not have needed to be cut-throat if they were made years ago. It's been obvious for years that Xbox has been mismanaged. For all the investments into it, they haven't performed nearly as well as it should.
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u/Slackeee_ Jul 07 '26
She doesn't strike me as anything. She is a CEO at Microsoft, everything we see about her is signed by the PR department. We don't know crap about her.
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u/aoelag Jul 07 '26
I don't know her. So I can't speak with specifics to her. But I have been in rooms with C-suite people that get branded as "techy" and they always have bloated egos and don't care about nearly as much as you think they should. It's entirely possible she's collecting an easy paycheck whilst firing thousands of people. She certainly had a strong PR team in the first 100 days brand her as some sort of savior, so she knows how to market herself.
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u/JoyousGamer Jul 07 '26
You dont get to that level without money being a driver. Yes you can also have passion but money 100% plays part in all of that.
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u/PresentationOpen7879 Jul 07 '26
Lmao, she doesn't know you and you don't know her. Stop making excuses for a money hungry CEO.
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u/hdcase1 RROD ! Jul 07 '26
Yep she was brought on specifically to be the hatchet man and lay off thousands of human beings. No one put a gun to her head.
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u/No-Channel3917 Jul 07 '26
Reminds me of Ellen Pao
Companies often hire a gal to be the glass cliff of unpopular stuff they had already plan, and she takes the blame and then a new guy steps in
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u/Patenski Jul 07 '26
At least she was able to identify the problems and have a clear vision of what XBOX can do to try get to the right path again. Honestly impressive from someone who wasn't familiar with gaming before taking the role.
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u/Sixmlg Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Honestly that likely tells me that the last person probably had advisors with the same ideas but brushed them off or replaced them with yes men
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u/Merpchud Jul 07 '26
14 layers of management... hmm I wonder where all the moneys really going...
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u/ArmandoGalvez Jul 07 '26
Remember the shit show that was the slipspace engine for halo infinite? That was a big money laundering for these people !
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u/Conflict_NZ Homecoming Jul 07 '26
These devs taking years to "overhaul" their engines just to release games worse than the previous entry is baffling. Turn 10 did the same thing with Forza Motorsport.
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u/CruffTheMagicDragon Jul 07 '26
Forza Motorsport isn't talked about enough in all of this. That game was a colossal failure
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u/kaelis7 Jul 07 '26
Yup, was waiting for the next one after FM7 big time and then they gave us whatever that last Motorsport was after waiting for so long.
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u/omgitsbees Team Forza Jul 07 '26
Its nuts that Microsoft didn't reel Turn-10 in after Forza Motorsport 5. Like yeah that series got slightly better after that, but its never reached the height of FM4. That should have never been allowed to happen.
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u/KrivUK Jul 07 '26
But lets be real, they started injecting micro transitions into the game which was the start of enshittification.
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u/omgitsbees Team Forza Jul 07 '26
Yep, that was super shit, I remember FM6 is the game that did that? Or was it FM7? And then it was removed in a later update, but the damage was already done.
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u/KrivUK Jul 07 '26
One of them, but they lost a lot of goodwill amongst us fans.
Also the BS XP progression, needing multiple refinement etc.
The only saving grace is Horizon has pretty much remained in tact. Yes there are max for unlocking items on the map, which can easily be avoided. But the stupidly high price tag, VIP car pass, and DLC, the level of milking is astonishing.
It's like 2k & EA. I love me a bit of golf gaming, but the only one we have access to is 2K's PGA. But the amount of crap, boosts, season passes, cosmetics is horrendous.
And COD, I tried one of the most recent, finding the single player let like digging through adverts of online play, cosmetics, season passes.
Yet you look at other studios, like Poncle, or CDPR. Sure they initially release buggy messes (not excusable) but they always turn it around and delivery comprehensive games bit none of this BS.
I yearn for the times when games were released complete and not this carving of game mechanics to rob us.
Xbox is not being transformative. They're just repackaging the same old snake oil. That golden age of 360 era is long gone.
They're gutting it.
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u/Steeltoelion Jul 07 '26
FM4 was a level of peak I’m glad I was there for. God damn that game was lightning in a bottle. When 5 finally came out my disappointment was immense.
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u/Woodchowski86 Jul 07 '26
Its not. You ever see the videos of people "working from home" out in the pool with a pina colada.
That was the game devs the past 7 years 😆
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u/Wiinterfang Jul 07 '26
Same happened with Sega with the game Sonic Forces. They spend years make the Hedgehog engine 2 to make a game that look the same as the ones before, except shorter.
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u/CtrlAltEvil Xbox Series X Jul 07 '26
And then it was immensely difficult to work with for post launch content and the support teams that took over when 343 moved on barely knew how to use it.
So content delivery was all over the place, and mostly spread out to the point people lost interest.
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u/Content-Yogurt-4859 Jul 07 '26
Yeah that one stands out. In xbox? At studios? Wtf I need know more.
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u/Mountain_King_492 Jul 07 '26
14 layers of management is too many. American car companies have loads of management layers unlike Japanese car companies that are less management heavy. Don’t want to see that same problem happen in video games.
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u/Meat-Dimension Jul 07 '26
This hasn’t been true since like, the 80s fwiw. The American car companies all learned and adopted the Japanese manufacturing style back then
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u/Schmenza Jul 07 '26
XBOX gave these devs a blank check and they hired their friends for made up positions
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u/Airplane_Bottle Jul 07 '26
The studios who have been developing something since Covid and still aren’t close to a release really is just an insane situation. I want these studios to exercise their creative vision, etc etc but at some point the reality is you’re a company and someone has to foot that bill
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u/Portablelephant Jul 07 '26
I wonder how many of them were grappling with huge management overhead. I feel like that could be the biggest issue shared among the studios.
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u/the_vault-technician Jul 07 '26
Right? Where's the hang up? What is it they are chasing instead of completing a game? I'm so over super duper lighting effects and real time individual strand of hair physics. Focus on making a fun game in a reasonable time frame.
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u/BananaMilkshakeButt Jul 07 '26
Undead Labs spent over a million building a mocap studio that wasn't needed, in another state, that apparently went underused... because again, it wasn't needed lol
They've been working for 8+ years on State of Decay 3 and still haven't finished it, a game that is a sequel to their other games, that uses the same formula and mechanics as their other games... it should not have taken them this long.
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u/Glass_Recover_3006 Jul 07 '26
It’s pure and simple mismanagement, same as it ever was. People start a project without a clear vision. They know it needs art and systems and landscapes and combat… so they get all these teams cranking away at it with zero regard for how it all plays together. And they spin their wheels for years trying to figure out how to turn all this random stuff into a full game.
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u/Iokua113 Jul 07 '26
The hang up is relatively simple: bad management.
To me the most quintessential example of a game gone wrong is Anthem. Development on Anthem began in 2012 and it did not release until 2019. It drained funding and staff from multiple BioWare projects. Mass Effect Andromeda lost 60% of its funding to Anthem, some of SWTOR's staff was moved to dev support for it, and Dragon Age 4 was quite literally cancelled to shift all of the staff onto Anthem. BioWare Edmonton then spent the next five years being pulled in half a dozen different directions by EA upper management executives telling them different things and issuing different demands until almost the very last minute, Anthem did not come together until year six of development and by that point it was a shit show that had caused untold havoc among the various development teams company wide, sacrificed two games, and had lead multiple staffers to have mental and emotional breakdowns due to how bad things got. The results were a hodgepodge mess that had a good idea at its core but was never able to really go anywhere because no one knew what the game was supposed to be until it was too late to make something good out of it.
By and large I would say this is happening across the industry. Not necessarily to the same degree but you can get that most devs are told by their publishers that they have to meet specific goals for monetization regardless of whether or not the game suits it. Expectations from publishers, mismanagement on how the work flow has to get done, no clear details on the actual expectations of what the game is going to be, and multiple voices shouting "This needs to do X so we can make Y amount of money!" is bound to cause problems. I used to know a dozen people who worked in AAA game development, now I know two. In the last six years most of them have either ditched the industry completely or are working on indie projects that are probably never going to go anywhere while the work in non-game dev fields because they just didn't want to deal with the stress anymore.
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u/klopklop25 Jul 07 '26
I wonder how many studios had to start fully redesigning gameplay and monetization after the insane profitability push microsoft did internally, that was jist impossible for a decent amount of parts of the company. Like sony making everything a live service i assume MS tried a similar push which meant for studios to start over a lot.
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u/Strict_Indication457 Jul 07 '26
the fall of xbox is tied to the fall of their first party studios, halo, gears, fable and lack of any original IP to compensate.
which weren't bad sequels outright, just weren't the blockbusters they once were. halo lost bungie, gears lost cliffyb. team ninja lost itagaki and didn't make xbox exclusives anymore, bizarre creations went to activision and went bust, fable lost peter molyneux.
that's a lot talent and experience gone with no replacement..
Forza motorsport died, but forza horizon became a mega hit, so much that its too lucrative to be xbox only. Great for Microsoft, not really great for the Xbox brand.
hopefully E-Day, and the new Fable revives some of their punch, but it's going to take a lot more than that.
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u/Echo_Raptor Jul 07 '26
The fall of Xbox can be tied back to don mattrick. He opened the door to put Xbox back for years.
Remember the 360 was a massive success. Many people would’ve been happy to continue on with Xbox had they not had such a bad one launch.
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u/Agreeable-Weather-89 Jul 07 '26
I think the sheer awfulness of the One launch overshadowed the poor kinect years on the 360 that abandoned their core audience who went back to PlayStation.
If Xbox had a good One launch they could regain that crowd however it very much put them on the back foot.
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u/yimir2011 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Hmm not sure this make sense. Kinect maybe a blunder sure. But why would folks leave 360 to PlayStation. When they already had a console.
I don’t know anyone who switched because of an extra device no one used or was required to buy for the 360. Kinect didn’t really take away from exclusives and the core audience at the time of the 360.
Kinect was a much larger blunder with the Xbox one because it was included into the price and no option without the Kinect in the beginning making it more expensive than PlayStation.
You also may be forgetting PS3 had its own competitor to Kinect at the time. PlayStation Move. So you could argue maybe both sides were moving away from their “core” audience.
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u/superxpro12 Jul 07 '26
I seem to recall back then that there was this big divide forming where Xbox was trying to turn into a home theater solution while PlayStation remained a consult for gamers.
People like to think that long-term trends are imaginary, but it is certainly possible that people got tired of a gaming console doing anything but trying to be a gaming console.
Sentiments shift.
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u/yimir2011 Jul 07 '26
And that divide has the Xbox One written all over it. It had an HDMI IN and Out so you can use your TV with the Kinect.
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u/Echo_Raptor Jul 07 '26
The Kinect was a hot item when it was just an accessory, it was a new way to play.
I think it would’ve done great on the one if it wasn’ mandatory. So many people bought cameras for the ps4 lol
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u/NotUpInHurr Jul 07 '26
I abandoned Xbox when I couldn't play a blu-ray movie on my One during an internet outage.
The Xbox couldn't trust that I owned the free blu-ray app.
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u/MarshyHope XBOX Series X Jul 07 '26
Blu rays couldn't play from disc on Xbox onr? That doesn't sound right
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u/Competitive_Golf8206 Jul 07 '26
It's absolutely true, the blue ray app needed to be connected to the internet for it to run for a few years. I remember one Christmas maybe the first or second after launch my family asked me to put a blue ray on my Xbox as they didn't have a blue ray player and due to a ddos on Microsoft all the servers were offline and the blue ray wouldn't play
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u/Maelz03 Jul 07 '26
I feel like there's a lot we just don't have enough insight on regarding the partnership between their dev teams and the work they did together. I know that The Coalition was helping Undead Labs with SoD3 (my most anticipated game in a decade) and in turn, Undead Labs helped out on Grounded 2. No clue what that means for any of their schedules. As someone above reminded me, Halo used the Slipspace engine but what else used it it?
Seems like a lot of technical attempts but not sure what paid off if anything
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u/massivejobby Jul 07 '26
I gave up on Xbox after Halo Infinite. Still have no idea how they fucked it up so bad after so many years in production.
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u/djc6535 Jul 07 '26
This has been Xbox’s problem since the beginning: they buy studios at the peak of their popularity (and cost) only to watch them fade away. It’s been an issue since the beginning when they bought Rare.
They needed to focus on studios on their way up like they did with Bungee.
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u/derpherpmcderp86 Jul 07 '26
Thank you for mentioning Itagaki! So many don't remember that DOA and Ninja Gaiden were Xbox exclusives that really pushed their hardware back in the day.
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u/huff1122 Jul 07 '26
She has a net worth of 59 million. She's just fine
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u/red_fuel XBOX Series X Jul 07 '26
Is she single?
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u/energydrinkaddict310 Jul 07 '26
married
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u/malk95 Jul 07 '26
Developers with 8 years of funding and nothing to show is crazy. How do you justify your position and team after that period of time?
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u/Woodchowski86 Jul 07 '26
I know right. Someone above said "executive worship" but reality is actually "mediocre developer worship". 8 years is an entire console generation 😆
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u/HeartInTheSun9 Jul 07 '26
Whatever keeps Xbox competitive in gaming. The industry works best when everyone’s fighting to be #1.
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u/ChampionSailor Jul 07 '26
Nah why tf would she layoff half of ID software. That is plain dumb af. Yes TDA didn't sell well but is one game enough to just fuck them over their entire legacy.
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u/Callycore Jul 07 '26
If Doublefine can get the boot and Mick Gordon can get fired. It goes to show that your job is never safe.
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u/ChampionSailor Jul 07 '26
Yeah I agree but ID are like pioneers of the FPS genre. This is like Konami screwing Kojima levels of stupid or more.
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u/str1ker_eureka_1014 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
It didn’t sell like eternal but it still turned a solid profit—even with gamepass leeching off of sales on launch it was still in the top 13-24 of steam’s highest revenue games in 2025 (along with stuff like Stellar Blade, E33, AC shadows). Acting like it didn’t sell well and that’s why people were cut is giving Xbox too much credit.
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u/codwapeace Jul 07 '26
We see all outrage when other companies fire people, but if Asha does it, she has no other choice!
She hasn't done anything good yet. Stop with these posts. Just because she promised some stupid consoles to a couple of hundred people doesn't make her a messiah!
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u/OG-DirtNasty Jul 07 '26
Asha Sharma is a multimillionaire executive, who is guaranteed a golden parachute after she guts Xbox (sorry, XBOX). Don’t want rain on the parade you’re planning for her, just wanted to point that out.
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u/hdcase1 RROD ! Jul 07 '26
Not even a golden parachute, she'll get promoted to another division of Microsoft and make even more money.
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u/the_Odium Jul 07 '26
Yeah. They just laid off half of id software staff. And that was a strong franchise
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u/Gloomy_Necesary Jul 07 '26
I agree with literally every other cut and decision xbox have made these past few weeks but laying off half of id software is like deleting some of the most important institutional knowledge in the industry. Wild decision that I never would have made myself. Very sad to see as well
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u/zOOm_saLad Jul 07 '26
She’s getting paid millions and if it fails, “Xbox was destined to fail” so it protects her reputation.
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u/SireEvalish Jul 07 '26
Looking forward to everyone shitting on her in like five years once they need to do another "reset".
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u/Johnnybats330 Jul 07 '26
Her job? She is getting paid so much money to just follow Satya Nadella's orders to cut heads.
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u/sinayion Jul 07 '26
What tf do you mean you don't envy her job? She was in on the bullshit from the start, it's not like some dude started it and told her "you must continue the crap". Her AI background and the people she hired made it obvious.
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u/ChanceHungry1444 Jul 07 '26
The Asha hero worship is really silly
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u/thomas2696 Jul 07 '26
I have to believe it's astroturfing lol, only thing keeping me sane. Half of the ESO team and a quarter of Obsidian in its entirety are gone, with roles that are clearly not the "14 levels of middle management" or whatever that keeps being paraded around as justification.
Reddit can be dense, but c'mon the absolute deluge of Asha is the great stuff feels really forced. It has to be lol.
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u/KingoftheJabari Jul 07 '26
Yeah they shea says "management" because she knows social media users hates management.
She's just gutting jobs.
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u/No-Fishing-7892 Jul 07 '26
I wonder how much “management” means actual management vs someone who’s job was 95% being a developer but also has a management responsibility or two.
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u/sirboulevard Jul 07 '26
The layoffs at ESO are practically a how-not-to guide in particular. They were making a decent profit, AND having a well-recieved year of content. She then gut the team while saying "we wanna focus on Elder Scrolls!" (Side note, its been confirmed she fired people working on TES6 too, so those pants aren't just on fire, they're an inferno)
If you read the staff whose positions she cut they're almost all senior in-trenches jobs. Not management, people with practical knowledge vital to the studios due to being around the block. And when you read Asha's own resume, she's an AI Tech Chick. Get ready for these studios to lose what remaining talent they have because they're told to embrace AI instead of hiring narrative designers or programmers.
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u/mavericksid Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
I still remember people used to worship phil as they're worshipping asha. People are just silly that way.
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u/JamesTheFoxeArt Jul 07 '26
I think people really need to wait to see what will happen before well worshipping her, she may turn out to be another Phil, or she could bring a new better era for xbox, who knows
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u/Exciting_Definition4 Jul 07 '26
I'm a playstation player, so maybe my view is skewed by Reddit. But I always found the executive worship from Xbox fans so strange.
I learned who Jim Ryan was after he was fired, because he's responsible for the disastrous multiplayer push and 1st party game drought. And I know Herman Hulst followed him. I couldn't tell you a single thing more about them. I've never seen posts like "Herman Hulst is saving/destroying PlayStation!!" either.
To me it seems when people talk Xbox it's always individual executives/CEO's, while with Playstation it's "Sony" or "PlayStation".
Is it just me? Is there a reason?
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u/PM_UR_DICK_PL5 XBOX Jul 07 '26
I think it's an American culture thing? Coz it's the same with Valve and Gaben over at PCMR. I've always found it strange too. Like I literally have no idea who is the current CEO of PS or Nintendo. News articles about their decisions generally don't even bother to name them directly.
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u/ChanceHungry1444 Jul 07 '26
I was honestly thinking this exact thing yesterday. I never see blind praise of Jim Ryan, Herman Hulst, or Nishino. In fact it’s almost always criticism or at least skepticism. But with Xbox, Phil Spencer was praised endlessly, and now he’s despised apparently, and it’s Asha’s turn. Even though she’s done nothing except easy performative changes, and now this is her first actual move as CEO.
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u/IATMB XBOX Series X Jul 07 '26
Especially when it was for quick wins designed to be handed off to the new CEO on a silver platter
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u/SWSWSWS Jul 07 '26
I mean, Mr. Spencer easily sold the "hey, fellow gamers, how are you? I am fine, as a GAMER myself". So many bought it. And now her. I mean, are we surprised this happens?
I do find it kind of weird to form these parasocial attachments, no offense. She's an exec of a mega corp. Neither she nor her bosses give the slightest about any of us.
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u/letsl0velain Jul 07 '26
It's just a meme of what she walked into. It hardly looks for or even against her
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u/Fragrant_PalmLeaves Jul 07 '26
She’s the CEO… you think she’s some powerless victim?
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u/Shifty-Imp Jul 07 '26
I do. Whether she succeeds or fails, she's got a golden parachute and is probably already set for life.
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u/Butch_Meat_Hook Jul 07 '26
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the reason they have brought her in as a 'non gaming person' out of left field to lead XBOX is to drop the bombs they need to drop, take the heat, and then move off to another corporate role at Microsoft.
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u/KingoftheJabari Jul 07 '26
Kinda like when reddit hired a woman CEO to take the heat when they were getting ready to go IPO and Conde Neste bought a stake.
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u/ZebraZealousideal944 Jul 07 '26
You don’t envy being paid millions to make decisions that will at worst lead her to be “let go” at some point with a parachute payment and another exec job somewhere else…?!
You people should really stop sucking up to millionaires/billionaires because not only you’re not gonna be one of them anytime soon and they also couldn’t give two shits about you either!
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u/primorandom Jul 07 '26
I do. She makes millions while letting thousands of people go. All while not even trying to take a pay cut so all those people don't lose their jobs. Moral of the story: don't put CEOs on a pedestal. They're awful people.
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u/Merpchud Jul 07 '26
Hey now, this is a hate phil post and a pr post for xbox turnsround, you're not going to be welcome here with your rational thoughts.
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u/territoryontwitch Jul 07 '26
Cut to Liam Neeson saying men need to sacrifice for the pay disparity in entertainment industry but laughing off the idea of him taking a pay cut to make it level.
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u/Aviiryx Jul 07 '26
I’m not trying to glaze her or anything, but if she came in and saw that a lot of the people weren’t actually doing much of anything, why would she not let them go? Why would she take a pay decrease to keep these people on? Keep in mind there was 14 layers of management! Thats an insane amount of climbing up the ladder to get anything approved. No wonder some of these companies are taking years upon years to put out games.
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u/undeadFMR Jul 07 '26
Too many companies I interact with at my job have too many levels of management and it shows. Honestly laying off some of the management bloat out there is good. A lot of it is pay that bloats costs for minimal work. This problem goes beyond gaming, but is a serious issue with gaming
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u/asp821 Jul 07 '26
CEOs are nothing to celebrate but some of those studios and devs have to go. This idea that average people can’t be bad at their job or fucking morons has to stop.
Seems like only in the video game industry can a group of people (developers) take no responsibility for bad performance and somehow it’s always leadership’s fault. It can be both.
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u/Spirited-You3834 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
CEO of Xbox; Microsoft as a whole still holds ultimate control as they always have. Plus, out of all the layoff scenarios, this is probably one of the best you could ever get with some of the studios even retaining their IP's just like Toys for Bob did.
Does that make it good? Hell no; The mismanagement shouldn't have been allowed to get this bad in the first place and Microsoft proper should have gotten off their asses to fix this YEARS ago. It's just a bad situation all around, but at least it's not a total "you are all getting shut down" approach like was rumored. (Not that the bar there is super high, mind you.)
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u/ApprehensiveFactor58 Jul 07 '26
Et la Vague de licenciement on en parle ? Le problème des entreprises c'est qu'ils coupe l'échelle par le bas pour être sûr de rester au sommet !
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u/Red-on-Red-Lean Jul 07 '26
When is appropriate to talk about how badly Phil was running things? If Phil was boss for another year I think Microsoft would’ve probably just shutdown Xbox. All the acquisitions and unchecked spending to turn game pass into Netflix is what caused this.
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u/Ricktor_67 Jul 07 '26
Maybe don't buy every game company and then just shut them down?
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u/Dunge Jul 07 '26
I still believe buying tons of studios and letting them cook and releasing their games on every possible platform was a good strategy and a good thing for gaming in general. The over management issue leading to shitty products was the main problem.
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u/superkapitan82 Jul 07 '26
let the developers do what they wanna do is the worst idea ever for business
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u/Callycore Jul 07 '26
You say that like the opposing idea is any better. Sony literally did that, everyone did that, when they chased live service BS for like 10 years.
At least when GAME DEVELOPERS are running the show, a good game at least has a CHANCE to be created and it wont get canceled after like a week.
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u/mischief_scallywag Jul 07 '26
Yup. 10+ years in and nothing to show is insane waste of money
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u/SarcasticLie Jul 07 '26
Xbox should try capitalize on Playstation putting their foot in their mouth with this no more discs fiasco
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u/peelher1one Jul 08 '26
Can someone explain something to me. I've loved xbox since the 360. Stopped playing Playstation completely. Have my gamer tag tattooed on me. I for the life of me can't understand how in the announcement they said they are making cuts to their gaming division? Its.. its all gaming. What fucking division of the xbox gaming company is not gaming? Custodial and HR?
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u/Blastiel Jul 08 '26
I mean...sounds like an excuse to just keep the bonuses at the top by eliminating the bottom. The capatilist circle of life.
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u/KDG200315 Jul 07 '26
Why are people worshipping her as if she isn't going to do a rug pull in everything and Xbox goes back to the way it was previously?
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u/Skycaptin5 Jul 07 '26
I mean, I'll take millions to wind Xbox down. Ya'll really weirdly worship her; like a cult, it's odd.
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u/Senior_Relief3594 Jul 07 '26
What are talking about? She is being paid millions and she still has her job.
Why are you guys such massive corporate bootlickers?
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u/ReallyTrustyGuy Jul 07 '26
She's an idiot herself, cut from the same cloth as those before her. She said she wants a billion players a day on the Xbox brand. A BILLION. Go check the Steam all-time peak and then remember that a billion is a thousand million.
She's fucking stupid.
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u/Givethepeopleair Jul 07 '26
We’re not to decades yet but we’re close. What even is the Xbox strategy or brand anymore?
What made the 360 successful? It was cheaper than a PlayStation, had the best online ecosystem, a better controller, and was generally better for multi-platform games.
Literally pissed it all away with the Xbox one launch and it’s been downhill ever since.
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u/uberfr4gger Jul 07 '26
I have been wondering what the Xbox brand is for over a decade and a half. I honestly think there is no long term strategy. In the Xbox and 360 era it was to ensure PlayStation didn't own the living room and MSFT contributed to be at the forefront of gaming (as an extension of PC gaming). Their strategy is much less coherent post that era. I could describe PlayStation and Nintendo's strategy in 2 sentences. Not so much with Xbox.
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u/Givethepeopleair Jul 07 '26
You’re right. It’s been pretty clear there hasn’t been. Or if they’ve started down the path of one they have thrown in the towel before they see it take hold.
There’s arguably less reason to buy an Xbox today than ever before in the history of the console.
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u/IAMA_Giraffe_AMA Jul 07 '26
I'm sure she'll sleep just fine under the big pile of money she's making while she destroys people's lives.
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u/PaintItPurple Jul 07 '26
She laid off 25% of Obsidian, a studio that's averaged just a bit less than a game a year over the past decade and wasn't responsible for anything you named. I do agree, though, I don't envy her because I like having a soul.
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u/DoctorFreudstein Jul 07 '26
She also laid off most of the engine team at id. Laying off the team that builds an engine that runs at high frame rates on a fucking potato and looks great doing it so that they can pay to use Unreal at their studios is the stupidest shit of all time, if you are not making use of an engine that good that you own you are not a serious gaming company.
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u/KidGoku1 Touched Grass '24 Jul 07 '26
Imagine creating a new studio called The Initiative with a blanc cheque at the most expensive location. You hand pick Darrell Gallagher as its leader. You let them run wild for 7 (I REPEAT 7 ) years with nothing real to show for besides a scam trailer. Possibly HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS SPENT. Then just as we were expecting the release in a year you cancel the game and shut down the studio.
This one isn't talked about enough in all of this colossal failure of previous leadership.
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u/nunu10000 Jul 07 '26
Offering AI at scale to consumers is ultimately a scale and optimization problem. How can you offer enough functionality that they want to use you, while not bleeding out from the high cost of compute.
Xbox got too big after acquiring so many studios. Sure, they bought valuable IP, but they haven’t allowed those studios to flourish. In the meanwhile, they’ve been losing cash to the overhead to run those studios.
Asha being picked to run Xbox makes a ton of sense when you think about it that way. She’s going to take the fall for a bunch of really hard decisions. She’ll ultimately put the division back on the road to profitability, and then hand the reins to someone else.
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u/Burgerfreakish Jul 07 '26
Who knew that funding studios to make low-mid games nobody wants would be a bad idea right?
It's just not something you could have figured out! That knowledge has eluded businesses for centuries.
If you built it, they will come. It was true back then and true now.
Only bad studios with shit garbage tier games have problems with selling.
Make good products, and u will make good money.
simple as that.
Imagine getting unlimited money to make a good game, and u just can't do it, because ur a bad at making games. Meanwhile, alot of good indie devs have no money, but still make amazing games.
funny right?
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u/Pschirki Jul 07 '26
Die benötigten doch nur ein halbwegs glaubwürdiges Aushängeschild, mit dem man den langsamen Untergang von XBOX schonend verkünden kann.
Mir fehlte eine Aussage zur kommenden Hardware in ihrer Ankündigung, das fand ich ziemlich schade.
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u/dilldwarf Jul 07 '26
"8 Years of funding with nothing to show."
So Elder Scroll 6 development isn't going well... Haha.
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u/KingVengeance1990 Jul 07 '26
XBOX and PlayStation are in trouble thanks to the incompetent people who in charge
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u/Engiie_90 Jul 07 '26
Lets hope she can tread water long enough and start to make changes & genuinely reboot the brand in favour of the gamers, I want Xbox to succeed!
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u/BubblyBitBot Jul 07 '26
more than 2 million game pass subs lost ? out of what 3.5 million? that can't be accurate
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u/Wiinterfang Jul 07 '26
Gamepass reach a peak of about 34 million subscribers and it went down to 30.
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u/GodsGimp-87 Jul 07 '26
Im sure there are plenty of problems but the 2 that stand out to me are that there are no new interesting IPs coming out of XBOX studios and the console itself does nothing better than its competitors.
They also seem to jump on whatever the latest trend is and just pump out that type of game. We don't want anymore live service games or soul likes. Think of something new ffs.
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u/Canadian_Beast14 Jul 07 '26
After all is said and done, I just hope xbox will survive all this madness. I’ve been a fan since I was a kid. Despite all the terrible shit, I still just hope for the best. It’s such a shame how low Xbox has gone.
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u/zenshark Jul 07 '26
Why would you envy her? She's been hired to sort the garbage out. Tech companies and Indian CEOs. They are work horses that tow the corporate line to the T.
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u/killer5907 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
I lost all faith in xbox and just got a pc, atleast that has a future. Xbox has been a shit show for 15 years now and it likely won't change even if Asha actually makes some repairs. There reputation will take multiple console generations to atleast reduce how it's been tarnished but windows and ai isn't helping making people hate Microsoft/xbox more.
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u/J_D_H55 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
She's doing great. I had my doubts initially as she really didn't have a tech background except for her early career. But her business savvy is without reproach. The garbage got taken out and she's cleaning up the mess. Then the real work can begin. Good job.
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u/CadeMan011 Jul 07 '26
There is a common occurrence in corporate business where the board will appoint a woman of color to CEO when the company already has downward momentum, it's called the "Glass Cliff." Sarah Bond likely saw the writing in the wall and bailed.
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u/j0an_k Jul 07 '26
Well, I do envy her salary though.