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Literal definition of Monkey’s Paw:
All the Phil Spencer haters get to rejoice that he is gone. But now he is replaced by a woman who has only ever had AI related positions at Microsoft, and previously worked at Meta.
Even her letter to employees sounds AI generated.
Exactly.
People forget that the Xbox game division is only a subset of Microsoft so Phil always had to answer to the bigger suits.
Phil actually made games. Phil came from a pretty cool era and I’ve seen him interviewed over the years by people who you only go talk to if you liked games.
As far as US game company execs go, Phil wasn’t the worst.
Also as far as I know, unlike the
of a certain studio who ruined WoW and CoD and more, he wasn’t mentioned recently on a certain set of files that were made public recently.I know it’s not exactly a high bar, but Phil actually seemed like someone who cared about gaming in general, but he probably also didn’t get to be in charge by pushing back and sticking his neck out to save everybody else whenever it came to making the Xbox division as profitable as the suits above him demanded.
Whoever is next will be likely switching from a shovel to an excavator to dig the Xbox brand’s grave.
maybe the woman is actually AI as well
Crazy how Microsoft spent the GDP of a decent sized country on acquiring game developers to bolster Xbox, then gave that strategy about 25 months to actually work before deciding “nevermind, pivot to AI then sell it for parts.”
The CEO gets a bonus if he increases the stocks value. They dont care if its actually profitable, as long as they get paid before it fails.
They really fucked up on their marketing by saying everything is an Xbox. Confusing non-gamers, annoying real gamers, and disappointing aspiring gamers.
I’ll not sure Spencer had been doing a great job, but this feels incredibly abrupt and makes me wonder if Xbox’s next generation hardware plans are cancelled in favor of a software and AI approach. The new CEO being an AI suit makes me think they want to take removed it a very different direction.
Microslop is making a number of baffling choices that were influenced by huffing the farts of Satya and other AI fools. Asha Sharma is in no way capable of running Xbox anywhere but into the ground (not like she’ll have to do much, given the state of Xbox). Phil Spencer retiring from Microslop is probably a move he made knowing they are going to continue their downward spiral. Sarah Bond resigning from her position is a curious one. I wonder if Microslop execs talked future plans for Xbox with her, and felt so stunned by their incompetence, Sarah decided to abandon the Xbox division. There are other factors likely involved, but, I doubt we’ll be privy to those details just yet. When the postmortem of Xbox is released…The people involved might talk about, at least I hope so.
As I don’t feel Xbox as a console has a future, my current plan is to abandon Xbox as a platform. It will take time because right now buying an upgraded Gaming PC will be difficult, due to the insanity of hardware prices. For now, I’ll have to simply save my money and bide my time.
I don’t doubt Sarah was being brought up as Phils replacement, but Satya wanted an AI puppet at the helm, so Asha got inserted. Being passed over for her ascent, Sarah had no real choice than to leave.
I quit Xbox after 3 Xbox 360s got the red ring of death just after the warranty expired. I’ll never go back even though I want clockwork revolution and a couple other exclusives.
XBox will still get development as long as Microsoft wants gaming on PC on a way it can somewhat control. Part of the reason why the XBox got made was because Microsoft already developed the software required to make a console.
What the removed is “overmuch”?
I edited that to: “not like she’ll have to do much, given the state of Xbox”. I was typing faster than my brain could think…It’s been a day.
Haha gotcha. I actually searched it up and overmuch is a word. Hadn’t heard that one before.
Yeah, ‘overmuch’ is a very useful word, great for shortening sentences! As an avid reader, I do see plenty of words…Rarely, do I use them because following KISS is for the best!
I’d be surprised if Xbox is a thing in 5 years after this news. The way things are right now Microsoft can’t make an Xbox console that will succeed by any metric. Maybe it’ll stick around as software.
Phil had to salvage the brand after the fucking disaster that was Xbox One and I don’t think he was terrible but it clearly wasn’t working out.
Replacing him with the head of Core AI is a fucking joke though.
With the cost of hardware skyrocketing and Sony closing studios gaming is in a really dark place right now.
Xbox is just going to be a brand/publisher I reckon.
There’ll be ‘Xbox verified’ console PCs or somesuch that aren’t necessarily made by Microsoft, and there’ll be the Xbox app for games and streaming, and Xbox published games.
And then another 5-10 years later they’ll phase that out and just be ‘Microsoft Gaming’ or somesuch branded, and the last traces of Xbox will be gone.
Gaming is in a great place. AAA gaming is not, because of-fucking-course corpos don’t understand art.
I wonder if this is a huge demotion for the AI guy. AI teams in Microsoft are “good” right now, I wonder if he fucked up in some way and they put him on xbox.
Yeah I don’t know. The knee jerk reaction Is “hey make Xbox have more AI”. She at least has the sense to have her first press release say “we’ll have no AI slop in our games” but we’ll see if that lasts.
CoD has been caught using AI art already.
COD hasn’t been worth playing in ~12 years.
The term „AI art“ irks me, IMO it tries to legitimize the virtual theft that it’s based on by implying there‘s a creative, artistic process behind it. It‘s gotta be a lobbied term.
Yeah thats fair. Slop is more appropriate.
A silver lining is that the NVIDIA/OpenAI deal was cut by ~70% this week, so hopefully the reality of AI not being a panacea sets in for those who have been driving the prices up. If the planned data centers never actually get built, production will shift back and consumer pricing should adjust accordingly. The MBA class will keep trying to manipulate it artificially of course, but they’ll only be able to keep the ruse this far from reality for so long.
It’s not all bad. AI can make some great creative games with lots of soul. There will be hundreds.
This is deffo bait.
This has to be sarcasm.
Please add /s if you’re being sarcastic because otherwise you just look like a fool.
That’s an obvious joke.
You’d hope, but it’s 2026 and there are some people who fucking date AIs. And removed them.
Soooooo yeahhhhh, clarification would be appreciated.
@hitmyspot@aussie.zone do you date ais?
Depends, who’s asking and what AI model are you based on? Pics.
Come on man, don’t be that guy. You’re better than that.
Considering how the person replacing Spencer has been known from leading Microsoft’s AI division and isn’t much of a gamer, this doesn’t make Xbox’s future rosy. Dwindling sales, large layoffs and RAM prices skyrocketing… I highly doubt they can build a competitive console.
Hey don’t discount them that much, they also can’t make games either. They’re going for full on business-only approach, consumers are not a priority for them at all anymore.
You can sell consoles with advertisement and marketing. The product is a secondary concern.
And with AI + bunch of privately owned mass media, you can saturate the brains of the next generation of gamers with endless targeted ads.
Fully expect Discord to begin vomiting ad spam into random chat streams like Reddit channels are getting bombarded with Crypto Casino promotions.
It really does seem to follow the classic arc of going from marketing to consumers to B2B but like, you can’t sell games B2B can you? It’s so direct to consumer
Because we don’t have any fucking money
My guess?
Former AI guy’s job is to figure out how to make AI make video games, and in the meantime, figure out how to cram AI data scraping into absolutely every possible element of … whatever Xbox Live is called now.
The first will almost certainly fail, the second is much easier and will make the division more profitable untill it gets axxed after the first thing totally fails.
If ram goes up for everyone, Microsoft is no worse placed. There will be less sales overall, but they could take a larger piece of that pie of they were good. They won’t.
One thing that might go in their favour is pc gaming. If ram and video cards get super crazy for long enough, people might have a single PC and gaming console. The steam deck should be well placed to take advantage. Microsoft could be too, with foresight.
“with foresight”
My brother in christ, they put an “AI” shithead in charge. They practically by definition cannot have foresight.
Haha, yes. But they could. They just won’t.
They are already tending towards “Everything is an Xbox”.
Now that you will own nothing because of AI. This is fantastic for them
I was honestly surprised when we got the Series. I was pretty convinced that they were done with consoles after the One X|S and that Xbox would become more of a Steam competitor as a brand. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Series ended up being the last console.
I would leave a flaming wreck too.
Phil was probably the last thing keep Xbox from fully imploding. You could tell he was an actual gamer that cared about the Xbox as a games console and not whatever Frankenstein they are going to turn it into.
It’s sad but Xbox had a really good run. Xbox won’t exist beyond the next console generation, it may not even make it that far before it just becomes gamepass.
Yeah, I’m glad I’m not alone in having that vibe about Phil.
If Spencer couldn’t keep the Xbox machine alive, an outsider who’s not a gamer is gonna ruin it more so than it is
PlayStation outlives yet another competitor.
Another?
Sega Saturn and Dreamcast, 3DO, Atari Jaguar just to name a few. Soon will be adding Microsoft’s XBOX to the list.
SEGA? A bit ancient history by now I guess
Sega, I guess?
I was going to say “good riddance”, but considering that his replacement is a former AI exec… Lol.
To be fair, I don’t envy anyone who is put in charge of the mess that is Xbox right now.
I wonder how much of this is the big bet that they placed on buying up Activision Blizzard (plus other studios) and not being able to show enough growth on Gamepass?
And now of course, with skyrocketing hardware costs, and the ripple effects of tariffs before that, even putting MS’s preoccupation with cloud services and AI to one side, the console business probably isn’t the money spinner it once was.
This could be good for gaming if it’s the death knell of subscription ‘ownership’.
After Mattrick, they probably shouldn’t have promoted internally from the executive class that went along with the pivot of internal studios to kinect and home theater media center. They needed leadership that knew how to deliver quality games on time. Saw Sony hit its stride mid-PS3 era with the advent of the AAA narrative action adventure game and could never adjust to that. I know American company, but maybe they should have looked to Sega, Capcom, Koei Tecmo to lead Xbox game studios and someone else to lead hardware and services. Xbox was at its best when it was paying for timed exclusives in the 360 era from third parties and funding 2nd party exclusives. Their internal studio production has been weak for like 20 years. Halo, Gears, Forza Motorsport, Fable has fallen to all of them in the doldrums and Forza Horizon being their only high tier Xbox associated IP now. I’d take someone from Square Enix today to lead Xbox studios today. The last decade they’ve churned out games even though mostly not AAA, they’re mostly solid games and satisfy a lot of niches like Dragon Quest Monsters. Square Enix games are oddly experimental and creative for such a large publisher. Something Xbox sorely lacks. Master Chief is barely surviving as a console mascot and that’s practically all they have at this point. Conker and Banjo are irrelevant with how they’ve handled those IPs
How sad for Obsidian Entertainment to go the same way as Black Isle Studios… but they probably will when the Xbox division completely fails.
Makes sense, Xbox is barely a thing anymore
