Surprisingly no mention of AI in an article about mass layoffs at a tech company. Wonder if that line has finally had all the juice squeezed from it to explain away layoffs and outsourcing.
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Mergers always lead to layoffs, games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.
Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall and cutting internal studios. It's much cheaper to just pay 3rd parties to release on Gamepass vs having to fund an entire games development.
I don't think we even see a real "Xbox" in the future. You'll have Xbox branded living room PCs with Windows. They're working on a gaming mode that I guess optimizes Win 11 a bit.
Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.
If it's outsourced to 3rd parties, in theory, shouldn't the number of jobs be the same?
Or are you alluding to AAA games not being as viable to the industry as it once was?
I am asking mostly because I seldom play AAA games (for some reason most of them turn me off), and I mostly play indie or retro titles. But I always recognized myself as an outlier, and I would presume most people are primarily interested in the big releases.
They are struggling to make the case for buying games from the Windows Store instead of Steam and they are struggling to make the case to buy an Xbox Console instead of a Sony or Nintendo Console.
If we see Xbox branded PCs in the living room- that's more a sign of pivoting due to failure than anything else.
Historically, games have actually performed extremely well in economic downturns.
Likely because they're extremely cheap entertainment if you count $ per hour of entertainment, but that's just my view on it.
And gaming as a whole is doing great. The only part that's falling off a cliff is the woke garbage life service games AAA studios have been releasing for the last ~10 yrs or so.
Whenever the studios didn't make dumb political messaging the core of the game... And instead made a good gameplay loop first, they've generally succeeded pretty well. It takes skill to make a game centered around political messaging and have it be good, (e.g. spec ops the line, MGS, metaphor:refantazio ), and none of the woke garbage that flopped ever had anything even attempting to create a world in which this messaging made sense. So we're left with completely nonsensical catering to politics no average person cares about whatsoever.
I mean we've even got single dev games that got to the charts of steam (schedule I).
Even when D3D12 came out there was commentary how very close it was to Vulkan, which was supposedly largely the work of DICE engineers working for AMD to create the preliminary Mantle implementation.
The explosive growth of the gaming industry over the 90s-2010s was fueled by continuously unlocking new swathes of consumers. Games went from being for kids, to being for adults and kids, to people who would never consider themselves "gamers" with mobile, which in turn created the "whaling" industry of microtransaction fueled F2P. But there's only so many new, large groups of people with money. What we're seeing now is a correction, with growth estimates collapsing back down to what you'd expect from a mature industry.