After a whirlwind of a day, packed with on-stage presentations, behind the scenes tours, hardware demos, and interviews, I finally sat down to my final appointment, and interview with the Xbox boss-man himself, Marc Whitten.
Whitten is one of Microsoft's corporate vice presidents, but more importantly he is the chief product officer for the Xbox brand. Within the Microsoft corporate structure, he is the top of the Xbox hierarchy.
The Nerd Stash: "The Wasteland is unforgiving, and there are a ton of brutal ways to die in the Fallout universe. We listed out the absolutely worst ones."
Microsoft just posted the third quarter of its 2024 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $61.9 billion in revenue and a net income of $21.9 billion during Q3. Revenue is up 17 percent, and net income has increased by 20 percent.
Xbox content + services up 62% while hardware down 31%... seems about right with the way they tout you don't need the hardware to play. People can play on their phones or smart tv or other means. I don't hardly play on my consoles directly since getting devices like the logitech g-cloud and ps portal. Which is to also say I have been playing more digital than physical because of these devices.
Too expensive hardware when others offer the same or more for less? Good work, Green Team.
"Despite some early successes for Xbox games on rival platforms, Xbox hardware is down by a massive 31 percent this quarter."
"Without Activision Blizzard, Microsoft’s overall gaming revenue would have actually declined this quarter."
"Xbox content and services would have only been up a single percent without Activision Blizzard..."
"It looks like next quarter is going to be a similar story for gaming at Microsoft, too."
That is crazy... so A/B/K is carrying the whole Xbox gaming.
Oh and Microsoft will be fine. Windows, Office and Cloud are growing with each pc purchase.
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
The big picture is the cloud and cloud gaming.
The Cloud will hardly do anything to "upgrade" the console over time as they had mentioned. Average Internet speed in the US is 8mbps or 1 Mb/s while the bandwidth of the system itself is measured in the tens of Gb/s. I guess we could settle for the static lighting they were talking about.
Am i the only one that got no drm out that interview?
I think the big secret is going to be letting you sell your game online for ms points that you can use for another games..
Smart if you ask me.. If true gamestop will have to start adjusting their crazy prices for games.