Phil Spencer needs to be canned

This is just bizarre. I've had the pleasure of playing Hi-Fi Rush and its amazing game in its own niche genre. To have the studio being shut down just like that for no apparent reason is extremely wrong and distasteful, it also screams "higher up politics" to me. I wonder if Starfield's not the greatest release had anything to do with it, or the studio was just too honest in their approach and can't bullshit their way like Todd. All in all, sad news, but great video as always.

So basically they fired the studio that made their only succesful game last year and kept the studio that made the greatest space adventure ever...makes sense.

It just gets better and better. Amazing.

And some people say that Sony and Nintendo are bad. At least these two didn’t shutdown fellow gaming companies just for stupid reasons. Hell, at least Sony and Nintendo still got mascots while Microsoft doesn’t know how to handle their video game mascots and their franchises right.

They cut the wrong studio. Should've been Bethesda.

You make me realize that there are so many beloved companies coasting on good will that they didn't even earn, with basically 0 of the people who earned that good will still working there. It's crazy.

Sorry dude hope you feel better!

Yet another symptom of the ailing state of the industry. Oh well, at least Stellar Blade was decent.

Yup - as a C# developer, I would never dream of going into the games business as a worker.

You can still purchase Office from Microsoft, but who knows how long till is no longer possible.

Microsoft will never have to pay the piper, aka, appease the fans.

Xbox has become such a shit show. Strategies seemingly changing daily, confusing messaging, and most importantly, they still fail to make large scale blockbuster games that everyone wants to play (Starfield was not it). Is Xbox going 3rd party? Are they focusing on COD, Diablo, Halo, and Bethesda? Will the next Xbox be relegated to a GamePass machine? All are questions that nobody has answers for. TBH, I don't think Microsoft executives even know the answers. Arkane Austin made one of my favorite games of all time, Prey. Hi-Fi Rush is one of the best games released in recent years. This is just sad. Speaking as an Xbox customer of fifteen years, I'm done with them. I bought a kick-ass PC last year, and I'm not going back to console (Playstation is no better, and in some ways, worse).

Doomer Vibes. But if I had to put a theory out. It is like in every part of life, it isn't about being good at something, but rather how good you can bullshit your way and how good you look like while doing so, literally just being a snakeoil salesman. It is like Todd, he is able to just lie, very confidently.

I've been using PC since the very early 90s and I've watched Microsoft closely all the way. They have NEVER been a consumer friendly company. People get fooled into thinking they are, when every now and then MS does something not utterly anti-consumer.... but it never lasts. Ever. This pattern repeats over and over. The very start of the company was marked by very nasty business tactics, including stealing another man's work and passing it off as theirs. Nothing much has changed, in terms of their ethics. They just got better at marketing. As for the games industry, MS has attempted to break into publishing multiple times over the past 3 decades. Each time they screw it up and give up, only to try again in a number of years. They have so much money they think they can brute force success without good management and executive decisions. And here we go again.

They could've stayed indie, companies don't have to be bought.

They're circling the wagons on the same tired IPs. Every single company in the creative space is doing this: they stifle innovation by doubling down on things that have made money in the past without figuring out how to make their IPs interesting or innovative. The reason Larian could sell Forgotten Realms was because they made an amazing game, and the IP helped rather than carried it. XBOX clearly believes IP will hard carry indefinitely even if I never achieves greatness.... Robbing themselves of that potential

Xbox never had the chops. never had the talent, and only had the vision during its first two consoles. now there’s no talent AND no vision, just dozens of billions of dollars to throw around randomly. it’s super-ineffective

I’d your games don’t sell then they can’t pay your wages.

MS needed Starfield to be xbox saviour. Same with Redfall. I think MS should get the talent behind Deus Ex and work on spiritual successor to that franchise. I don't think they are punishing those devs. It's just they must prioritise their focus on tried and tested stuff. The economy is crap. People have to hold onto $ more tightly and until Trump gets back into power you will not see any improvement in the consumer spending. The dollar is worthless. People struggle to pay for essentials. The commies have got to go. To adjust to that, MS have to cut their losses now and minimise doing any risky stuff. I think they should continue to improve Starfield as much as possible and honor the promise to keep this game something that will maintain interest for 10 years despite that sounding like a tough task. I just think it is fair since No Man's Sky succeeded in doing this. If Todd has ambition he should be planning to constantly add things over time. (while working on the ES6) Prove the critics wrong by diligently fixing its flaws, adding new stuff, and tweaking the systems until you can refine this to perfection. Launch edition is like the demo, current version is less buggy edition, and future versions will be the realisation of Todd's "daggerfall in space" dream with tons of content. They got lazy and just need to listen to feedback on how to flesh out the universe with more stuff, and adjust the procedural generations here and there. (less repetitive dungeons. Add more variants so people get to see more different ones) Remember that Starfield is not a space sim. It's something between RPG and survival game imo. But space simulation fans forget the space ship stuff isn't the core of the game. Just think of the game Daggerfall but in space instead of on a huge map where your horse will take roughly 10 minutes of high speed galloping in the wilds to get from town to town. They did that in Daggerfall for immersion reasons so it would feel realistic! Not to spread content out so far apart to make you bored. It's part of the feeling of being isolated from civilisation when you are out there on your own in the wilds by yourself and then suddenly get to a town and can breath a sigh of relief that you might have somewhere to rest and talk to. It is kinda relaxing to me. Starfield has that same formula where space is so vast that you will fast travel from planet to planet because that's what George Lucas Star Wars movies did. You didn't see massive screentime devoted to showing off planets in Star Wars. You got a few seconds and that's it so that on replays of the movie you didn't get bored. It was fast paced. Starfield wants it to feel like that. But while on foot you take ages to get from place to place like in Daggerfall. (again immersion reasons not to make you bored) We have become 10 times more impatient today and developed ADHD so attitudes have changed. Watch any movie before star wars, and you will yawn at how slow paced movies were back then. Critics said Star Wars was way too fast-paced. But by today's standards Star Wars pace is normal! So what Bethesda did with SF is make the space travelling part as fast paced as star wars (because space IS boring) but make the on foot travel slow-paced like a Daggerfall game. The main problem is repetition of the same dungeons over and over again. Just keep making more dungeon variants and this problem goes away.