PC Gaming

Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really expanding by buying up those studios, promising great output for them in the future!". Line goes up.

Microsoft then does nothing except investing all of their money into AI.

Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really streamlining their organisation by dumping all of those useless dead weight studios. Excellent management". Line goes up.

Im not even sure the extinguish part is intentional here. I think they are just genuinely this incompetent, but Greys Law applies here imo.

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Not nothing. They remade a bunch of games worse than the originals.

(Some people did enjoy Viva Pinata, but I didn't play that.)

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

Fear of missing out. It is institutionally ingrained into Microsoft when they were publicly burned for "missing out on the internet."

It's just like destroying all the health pickups in a multiplayer game so the other team can't heal, I guess.

For a long time, their value proposition was "use us because what else can you do?" Trying to monololize the gaming industry by buying up whatever good studios they can is just a part of that.

Because it's run by fucking idiots with MBAs who have no connection whatsoever to the company's profits and losses.

They wanted to own existing IP. Not make new stuff. Buy an asset, milk it, and that'll do. Any words about long-term maybe were lies.

Looking for exclusivity of games to "beat" other companies. As always is their model of "force people to pay us" instead of "make something compelling". Its the Microsoft way.

my best guess is the people who signed off the purchases aren't the same people who evaluate the value of the things they have purchased

If you buy up all your potential competition, you have no competition.

Or user privacy.

Or valuing their own workers.

Or how to respectfully be a part of the F/OSS ecosystem.

Or humanity's desire to not live in a pollution stream from their AI processing centers (they're not really "data centers").

Or that we all wish LinkedIn would self-destruct under the weight of its own bullshit, and magically blink itself out of existence.

I can't imagine a company founded on its operating system, now deciding vibe coding that flagship product is a good idea... Especially vibe coding literally all of their software products... Dumb as shit.

Also everything they make is now a web browser shell with the app running inside which makes everything slow and memory hungry.

They had vision and knew how to build a brand. The current CEO's idea of branding is to name their products after a tool that absolutely no one will be using.

I have talked to a mobile game Dev, a very drunker heart to heart. He had an India mobile game (like alto). He made about 120k in 5 years between two versions of the game. And then some tenent adjacent studio offered him 650k for the IP.

In his words "All I could think was that in 650k, my house would be paid. My education loan would be paid and I would still have enough money to ensure my kid goes to college and not worry about an education loan. I knew selling game would mean enshittification of my baby. But then i looked at my actual baby and I knew I had to betray the digital one"

That's the first time I saw it from the dev point of view. He wanted to keep the project, but between choosing fans of his games that can't keep a subreddit alive and doing right by no name, no face fan base vs 650k hard cash from a shitty studio that would concretely secure his family's future. I am not sure if I would hold out.

I know it's not the same with the studio Microsoft bought..... But I can't help but wonder people who sellout might not be such horrible pieces of shit that we imagine them to be.

FYI Doom The Dark Ages was available day 1 on game pass and they were boasting on social media that they had over 3 million players on the first week if I remember right.

It's Microsoft's fault the game didn't sell. Most people (me included) opted to subscribe to game pass for a month instead.