As the former lead of CoreAI at Microsoft steps in to replace Spencer, the question remains. What does the future of Xbox with AI look like?
So, who exactly is she? Well, externally, she’s the former VP of Product and Engineering at Meta, CEO of Instacart, and current board member for Coupang and Home Depot. She only recently came to Microsoft in 2024 as the President of CoreAI. Don’t worry, if you’re double-checking to see if any of that is related to gaming in some sort of way, let me save you the trouble; it’s not.
The health of video games shouldn’t be measured by what Microsoft does. That’s like measuring the economy based on how a bunch of big companies are doing.
It’s inaccurate as hell and doesn’t actually take into consideration the small folks who make up the majority.
Thankfully, it’s not, not in any meaningful way. The source is a big indicator of how much you should trust the assertion being made.
Actual broad metrics show that gaming in general is currently the most profitable entertainment industry, and it’s not even close. So that’s good, MS is just assmad that they’ve very efficiently begun removing themselves from that industry at this point.
Don’t you love it when you are working for a big company, and they announce that the new CEO is from Coke or Pillsbury or Ford or some other industry that has nothing in common with yours, but somehow just doing the same job as the last know-nothing that they fired, using the same current popular experimental business strategies, is going to be better this time?
And then they pay them millions to fuck it all up, while they pay you a pittance to try to keep it together, as they fuck it up.
At my last company they got rid of the CEO because of some thing she was doing. They have a big meeting to tell us and introduce the guy that’s replacing her… The guy who got hired a year ago, spent who knows how much on some “fleet management” software. Software that we never used because we all objected to installing the app on our personal phones that wanted to track our location and have all sorts of other crazy permissions. Dude just failed up to CEO
Lol I wonder if windowscentral and MS got in a feedback loop and that’s why MS was surprised at how much people hate copilot integration with the OS and every program they can shove it into.
The money is in real games, made by real humans, small teams, low budgets, no corpo meddling. It’s time to unplug from these huge corporations and their agendas. They are the ones out of touch. They are the ones in a bubble. The indie scene is thriving. Check it out!
Perhaps there is some future market for infinite AI generated slop, but I want no part in that. Games are art. We learn from and relate to art, grow as people. AI is nothing more the. infinite flashing lights. This is dystopian bread and circuses to keep us docile while the billionaires and civilization.
Microsoft can just go on doubling and tripling down on bad decisions indefinitely and make it everyone elses’ problem because they have so much money that it barely matters if they fail.
Soulless corps and political parties love to put women and especially women of color in positions of power when things go sour. They don‘t expect her to be there for long. She‘s essentially a scapegoat hire.
Anyone who thinks Xbox is still going to be worth anything is a fool. They overspent on gaming studios, didn’t produce anything of value, gamepass value went down, and now everyone hates them for the constant enshittification. Even stepping back from “This is lemmy and we all hate microsoft” they have done some horrible business moves with Xbox. I don’t know anyone who is positive about the brand. They have ran it firmly into the ground.
I dont think the analogy works. Gas taxes are universal in the U.S. for road fuel, they also fund infrastructure, not stock holders and CEOs.
A tax is not an arbitrary subscription fee, it’s an ongoing expensive.
In order for your analogy to work, the fee would need to be created out of no where for no reason other than self enrichment; and there would need to be a viable alternative that provides practically the exact same benefit with no fee. The fee would also need to expire and require renwal despite not using the product, which isn’t the case for gas.
It works pretty well. The console network fees fund infrastructure, the employees that run the infrastructure, etc. neither the gas tax nor the console network fees are arbitrary. As for the “required renewal despite not using it” thing we just have other things for that in the form of vehicle registration.
well. The console network fees fund infrastructure
I mean where they spend the money is irrelevant. If I rob you, is it suddenly okay if I spend your money responsibly? No.
PC has had online multiplayer since the creation of the internet, and PC did it without ever having a fee on top of internet access.
I would also argue that playstation plus membership fees, with all their millions of dollars, have not created a better environment than what available on PC for free, so…
So it’s ok to pay money for infrastructure for your car to use, but when you have to pay for the infrastructure for your video games it’s robbery? Now I feel like you’re the one being arbitrary.
PC has had online multiplayer since the creation of the internet
This tells me you weren’t around for the early days of PC gaming. On the contrary, PC gaming went through a couple phases when it came to online multiplayer. Early multiplayer games often didn’t have matchmaking or dedicated server discovery at all, then there was the Gamespy era where a bunch of games delegated their multiplayer matchmaking to a third party with limited functionality and ads unless you paid a premium subscription.
It was the game consoles that really fixed multiplayer early on with their party systems that persisted outside of each game. Today Steam has similar functionality, but Valve is just eating those costs, just as Sony used to. Difference is Valve doesn’t have to sell you your computer at a loss, they they can have loss leaders like that in different areas.
but when you have to pay for the infrastructure for your video games it’s robbery?
We already discussed this. The Playstation Plus subscription isnt paying for internet infrastructure. PC has no monthly fee, and it’s infrastructure is exactly the same.
This tells me you weren’t around for the early days of PC gaming
Oh I was… So Xbox game pass released in 2002, PlayStation followed much later in 2010.
In 2002 Warcraft 3’s multiplayer was fine. In 2002 Battlefield 1942 was fine; It was a good as Halo’s multiplayer, which somehow ALSO had fine multiplayer at release in 2001 despite the subscription service for multiplayer not until a year after the game had already launched.
It was the game consoles that really fixed multiplayer early on with their party systems that persisted outside of each game.
Even if I gave you that, the subscription “fee” isn’t what fixed multiplayer design, that was fixed by… Game developers.
But as always they will blame “market conditions” and “customers changing tastes”. Instead of “we pointed a fuckload of MBAs that only care about monetizing in the short term and milking every penny we can short term even though it’s killing all long term prospects of the product and driving away customers in droves”
“we pointed a fuckload of MBAs that only care about monetizing
If I ever end up in a position where I’m reviewing potential employees, having an MBA is going to be an automatic rejection, regardless of their other qualifications.
Imo, getting an MBA makes you worse at being a productive employee. And the people that get them don’t have personalities that are conducive to being good at their jobs
You have that alternative already so when you‘re in that boat nothing really changed. But yes indie games will see the largest growth in the game industry this year for sure. Mega corps can‘t help but shooting themselves in the foot in blind greed.
They’ve already announced that the new Xbox is made by ASUS so I think that confirms my long held suspicion that they’re transitioning to an XBOX store for PCs, much like the XBOX Ally
I remember being very annoyed, for years, that Microsoft stoped releasing their flagship gaming franchise, Halo, for their most popular platform: Windows. For years, only Halo and Halo 2 were released for PC, and Halo 2 was almost unplayable due to Microsoft’s massive cockup with Games for Windows Live. It was clear they didn’t give a shit about their customers as they tried to force them to re-buy hardware and pay a monthly fee, while simultaneously sabotaging gaming on the PC.
It wasn’t until just a few years ago where Microsoft released their most popular franchise for their most popular platform. I’m still salty about that.
God damn am I happier now though. I don’t have an xbox or a Windows computer, I’m not beholden to their decades of compounding bad decisions.
They wont abandon the brand but it will be much more focused monetization and exploration of existing gamers. Pushing for more subscriptions, more live servcies, pushing for their streaming services, and using gamers to train their AI.
Given their push for copilot gaming, wouldn’t surprise me if they use the last two to make some kind of claim they’re use AI to reduce latency by having AI “predict” your moves making streaming better.
So Sony said something similar about milking it’s current customer base more by charging more for services/software and not really offering anything new in return. Console gaming maybe dead or at least the next generation will most likely be the last.
I don’t see consoles surviving for much long with so many things working against them like AI, cloud services, mobile offerings, PC alternatives, and increasing hardware costs.
Also if AI can predict what I’m going to do and do it for me then what if that’s not what I was going to do. It would suck the joy out of actually doing the things. Single player games probably don’t matter as much but feel like it would ruin PVP like overly aggressive aim assist.
Consoles will be the last to go because they’re the only gaming hardware sold as loss leaders. The days where you could “Build a better PC for the same price” are long, long gone. When the consoles go, gaming as a mainstream industry goes wirh them.
You could never really build a better PC for the same price, consoles were always $300 to $400 cheaper than the equivalent PC at launch by design. Pre gen4 consoles really had to compete with Arcades and gen4 to gen 6 really only had to compete with each other. Gen 6 and after now have strong competition from PC and mobile.
PC suffered from a lack of eco system, cost, and complexity. Consoles were sold at a loss at launch because the software was tied to the proprietary hardware and they could make their money back by offering exclusive games and pay to play online.
Now consoles are just under powered custom PCs and Steam/GOG have built eco systems for PC to make PC gaming more friendly and now Steam is building hardware to make PC gaming more affordable. Plus with cloud gaming everyone can stream just about any game no matter what hardware they have.
Nintendo will probably hang on the longest with their unique hardware and IPs that will never ever get ported to another system, at least not until Nintendo no longer builds their own hardware.
AI and Cloud gaming will probably be the biggest thing to revolutionize the gaming industry and probably the most destructive since Atari over saturated the market. At least in the short term.
There wasn’t ever a time you could build a better or even comparable PC for the same cost as consoles in modern gaming history. It’s always been something with a higher entry cost and the cost benefit coming over time with cheaper games and no mandatory subscription.
Yet PC gaming is now the “mainstream”, with it being the biggest platform globally.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Rules
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you’re submitting before posting to see if it’s already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don’t share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don’t want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
The health of video games shouldn’t be measured by what Microsoft does. That’s like measuring the economy based on how a bunch of big companies are doing.
It’s inaccurate as hell and doesn’t actually take into consideration the small folks who make up the majority.
Thankfully, it’s not, not in any meaningful way. The source is a big indicator of how much you should trust the assertion being made.
Actual broad metrics show that gaming in general is currently the most profitable entertainment industry, and it’s not even close. So that’s good, MS is just assmad that they’ve very efficiently begun removing themselves from that industry at this point.
… we could have both industries… but fuck AI
Don’t you love it when you are working for a big company, and they announce that the new CEO is from Coke or Pillsbury or Ford or some other industry that has nothing in common with yours, but somehow just doing the same job as the last know-nothing that they fired, using the same current popular experimental business strategies, is going to be better this time?
And then they pay them millions to fuck it all up, while they pay you a pittance to try to keep it together, as they fuck it up.
You get to watch somebody make more money than youll make in your entire life to fuck up to the point where you lose your job
At my last company they got rid of the CEO because of some thing she was doing. They have a big meeting to tell us and introduce the guy that’s replacing her… The guy who got hired a year ago, spent who knows how much on some “fleet management” software. Software that we never used because we all objected to installing the app on our personal phones that wanted to track our location and have all sorts of other crazy permissions. Dude just failed up to CEO
Slopya Nadella
Lol I wonder if windowscentral and MS got in a feedback loop and that’s why MS was surprised at how much people hate copilot integration with the OS and every program they can shove it into.
The money is in real games, made by real humans, small teams, low budgets, no corpo meddling. It’s time to unplug from these huge corporations and their agendas. They are the ones out of touch. They are the ones in a bubble. The indie scene is thriving. Check it out!
Perhaps there is some future market for infinite AI generated slop, but I want no part in that. Games are art. We learn from and relate to art, grow as people. AI is nothing more the. infinite flashing lights. This is dystopian bread and circuses to keep us docile while the billionaires and civilization.
As an ex-record industry executive, I know what it’s like to be part of an industry that decides to just shoot itself in the head.
Microsoft can just go on doubling and tripling down on bad decisions indefinitely and make it everyone elses’ problem because they have so much money that it barely matters if they fail.
At some point you have to be impressed by Microsoft’s dedication to ruining their own products
They’re like the Democrats of the Gaming Universe, always snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
the fact that they picked a woman of color to be the new lead of xbox lmao. least obvious glass cliff
I remember the Halo x Bonobo incident very clearly, the higher ups of that company are incredibly socially incompetent at best
To be fair, Sarah Bond was in a similar position and is a woman of color, too.
Yeah, the situation is largely the same as when everyone was convinced xbow wouod quit making consoles (or worse with hardware prices now).
Cant see how this can go well.
Soulless corps and political parties love to put women and especially women of color in positions of power when things go sour. They don‘t expect her to be there for long. She‘s essentially a scapegoat hire.
Interesting concept
Anyone who thinks Xbox is still going to be worth anything is a fool. They overspent on gaming studios, didn’t produce anything of value, gamepass value went down, and now everyone hates them for the constant enshittification. Even stepping back from “This is lemmy and we all hate microsoft” they have done some horrible business moves with Xbox. I don’t know anyone who is positive about the brand. They have ran it firmly into the ground.
Screw all the consoles. They deserve extinction for scamming everyone for years by requiring monthly subscriptions to play online.
Literally like selling someone a subscription to drive your car out of town.
We do have that. It’s the gas tax we pay to the government.
I dont think the analogy works. Gas taxes are universal in the U.S. for road fuel, they also fund infrastructure, not stock holders and CEOs.
A tax is not an arbitrary subscription fee, it’s an ongoing expensive.
In order for your analogy to work, the fee would need to be created out of no where for no reason other than self enrichment; and there would need to be a viable alternative that provides practically the exact same benefit with no fee. The fee would also need to expire and require renwal despite not using the product, which isn’t the case for gas.
It works pretty well. The console network fees fund infrastructure, the employees that run the infrastructure, etc. neither the gas tax nor the console network fees are arbitrary. As for the “required renewal despite not using it” thing we just have other things for that in the form of vehicle registration.
I mean where they spend the money is irrelevant. If I rob you, is it suddenly okay if I spend your money responsibly? No.
PC has had online multiplayer since the creation of the internet, and PC did it without ever having a fee on top of internet access.
I would also argue that playstation plus membership fees, with all their millions of dollars, have not created a better environment than what available on PC for free, so…
So it’s ok to pay money for infrastructure for your car to use, but when you have to pay for the infrastructure for your video games it’s robbery? Now I feel like you’re the one being arbitrary.
This tells me you weren’t around for the early days of PC gaming. On the contrary, PC gaming went through a couple phases when it came to online multiplayer. Early multiplayer games often didn’t have matchmaking or dedicated server discovery at all, then there was the Gamespy era where a bunch of games delegated their multiplayer matchmaking to a third party with limited functionality and ads unless you paid a premium subscription.
It was the game consoles that really fixed multiplayer early on with their party systems that persisted outside of each game. Today Steam has similar functionality, but Valve is just eating those costs, just as Sony used to. Difference is Valve doesn’t have to sell you your computer at a loss, they they can have loss leaders like that in different areas.
We already discussed this. The Playstation Plus subscription isnt paying for internet infrastructure. PC has no monthly fee, and it’s infrastructure is exactly the same.
Oh I was… So Xbox game pass released in 2002, PlayStation followed much later in 2010.
In 2002 Warcraft 3’s multiplayer was fine. In 2002 Battlefield 1942 was fine; It was a good as Halo’s multiplayer, which somehow ALSO had fine multiplayer at release in 2001 despite the subscription service for multiplayer not until a year after the game had already launched.
Even if I gave you that, the subscription “fee” isn’t what fixed multiplayer design, that was fixed by… Game developers.
But as always they will blame “market conditions” and “customers changing tastes”. Instead of “we pointed a fuckload of MBAs that only care about monetizing in the short term and milking every penny we can short term even though it’s killing all long term prospects of the product and driving away customers in droves”
If I ever end up in a position where I’m reviewing potential employees, having an MBA is going to be an automatic rejection, regardless of their other qualifications.
Imo, getting an MBA makes you worse at being a productive employee. And the people that get them don’t have personalities that are conducive to being good at their jobs
I think if anything this proves the Gamer Era has just begun: Free of corporatocracy.
I think that gamers will fight tooth and nail to keep the yoke on.
You have that alternative already so when you‘re in that boat nothing really changed. But yes indie games will see the largest growth in the game industry this year for sure. Mega corps can‘t help but shooting themselves in the foot in blind greed.
deleted by creator
They’ve already announced that the new Xbox is made by ASUS so I think that confirms my long held suspicion that they’re transitioning to an XBOX store for PCs, much like the XBOX Ally
I remember being very annoyed, for years, that Microsoft stoped releasing their flagship gaming franchise, Halo, for their most popular platform: Windows. For years, only Halo and Halo 2 were released for PC, and Halo 2 was almost unplayable due to Microsoft’s massive cockup with Games for Windows Live. It was clear they didn’t give a shit about their customers as they tried to force them to re-buy hardware and pay a monthly fee, while simultaneously sabotaging gaming on the PC.
It wasn’t until just a few years ago where Microsoft released their most popular franchise for their most popular platform. I’m still salty about that.
God damn am I happier now though. I don’t have an xbox or a Windows computer, I’m not beholden to their decades of compounding bad decisions.
Play splitgate. It’s pretty much halo done right.
And works on Linux flawlessly.
I mean they made a console for the same reason as everyone else: They wanted a dedicated DRM machine. One that they can control from bottom to top.
They wont abandon the brand but it will be much more focused monetization and exploration of existing gamers. Pushing for more subscriptions, more live servcies, pushing for their streaming services, and using gamers to train their AI.
Given their push for copilot gaming, wouldn’t surprise me if they use the last two to make some kind of claim they’re use AI to reduce latency by having AI “predict” your moves making streaming better.
So Sony said something similar about milking it’s current customer base more by charging more for services/software and not really offering anything new in return. Console gaming maybe dead or at least the next generation will most likely be the last.
I don’t see consoles surviving for much long with so many things working against them like AI, cloud services, mobile offerings, PC alternatives, and increasing hardware costs.
Also if AI can predict what I’m going to do and do it for me then what if that’s not what I was going to do. It would suck the joy out of actually doing the things. Single player games probably don’t matter as much but feel like it would ruin PVP like overly aggressive aim assist.
Consoles will be the last to go because they’re the only gaming hardware sold as loss leaders. The days where you could “Build a better PC for the same price” are long, long gone. When the consoles go, gaming as a mainstream industry goes wirh them.
You could never really build a better PC for the same price, consoles were always $300 to $400 cheaper than the equivalent PC at launch by design. Pre gen4 consoles really had to compete with Arcades and gen4 to gen 6 really only had to compete with each other. Gen 6 and after now have strong competition from PC and mobile.
PC suffered from a lack of eco system, cost, and complexity. Consoles were sold at a loss at launch because the software was tied to the proprietary hardware and they could make their money back by offering exclusive games and pay to play online.
Now consoles are just under powered custom PCs and Steam/GOG have built eco systems for PC to make PC gaming more friendly and now Steam is building hardware to make PC gaming more affordable. Plus with cloud gaming everyone can stream just about any game no matter what hardware they have.
Nintendo will probably hang on the longest with their unique hardware and IPs that will never ever get ported to another system, at least not until Nintendo no longer builds their own hardware.
AI and Cloud gaming will probably be the biggest thing to revolutionize the gaming industry and probably the most destructive since Atari over saturated the market. At least in the short term.
There wasn’t ever a time you could build a better or even comparable PC for the same cost as consoles in modern gaming history. It’s always been something with a higher entry cost and the cost benefit coming over time with cheaper games and no mandatory subscription.
Yet PC gaming is now the “mainstream”, with it being the biggest platform globally.
For the past 15 years, the hardware costs have been subsidized by both online subscriptions and storefront cuts for digital purchases.
That being said, consoles haven’t been sold at a loss for multiple generations now. They’ve mainly been cheaper due to economies of scale
I’ve got 2,000 steam games I haven’t played yet. The era of the gamer has a big enough buffer to not end for years.
And the fact that indie studios continue to put out bangers. It’s just aaa corpotrash gaming that is ending.
Exactly. I don’t mind paying 30 euros for Mewgenics, for example.
Thank the good Greek lords for indie games.