Escapist Magazine: Microsoft is promising a whole new Xbox, with multiple new services and consoles in the works. But has Microsoft really learned from past mistakes? Microsoft made the second-biggest Understatement of the Year last week when Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox said, “We’ve not always lived up to our aspiration of keeping gamers at the center of everything we do when it comes to the experience they’ve had on Windows.” I think it would be more accurate to say that they’ve failed at living up to the most basic expectations of consumers, but I guess the other way sounds nicer. I’d prefer it if the company admitted to specific mistakes so we knew what faults they were supposedly trying to improve.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Today, Koei Tecmo announced its financial results for the full fiscal year 2025, related to the period between April 2025 and March 2026.
Xbox boss Asha Sharma has discussed how component shortages will impact the company's plans for Project Helix.
When does this end? Its killing everyone. Consoles and PC. And for what? AI? The benefits of AI are completely outweighed by the negatives. And the government should have never allowed one company to buy up all the RAM.
This kind of proves this is an after thought product, most products like this are in r&d 5 years before they start mass producing. So they typically have the cost of components and things worked out long before assembly starts.
This is an assumption still, but I wouldn’t be surprised if project helix is similar to Scalebound,perfect dark and sod3. They had an idea but no actual execution other than concept stage. Being impacted by the ram shortage likely would also put this device 3-4 years out.
I’m not even sure MS has that endurance with Xbox yet
I mean.... what?
We're at a point that Samsung wont even provide their own phone department ram because they can sell it at higher prices to 3rd parties (AI). Its more profitable to sell the ram than make their own devices with it.
You think because R&D starts 5 years ago the 3rd party component manufacturers will honour that price? They'll sell it to whomever is paying the most today, not some gentlemens agreement they made years ago. AI farms will buy more volume at higher prices than any console manufacturer will. It'll be the same for Playstation.
Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.
They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.
If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.
It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie
Helix is going to be stupidly expensive
Instead of leaning into smarter upscaling techniques they're brute forcing hardware that will cost them dearly and it remains to be seen if it's genuinely going to provide a meaningful differential
I know in the oc.doace people like to brag about not using frame gen or dlss to get to high on a game but for the majority of players they happily use those technologies without a second thought
That's going to be ps6 vs Helix
While this does seem to be the case, I am encouraged by the statement from Microsoft about wanting to provide affordable options. If this means a Series S style Helix, at least there will be something affordable being offered.
It's called systematic inflationary. Yes we get it Microsoft, keep raising in the name ofall kinds of stuffs
Honestly if there was thing I learned from this generation is that new consoles arnt day one anymore.
I can wait 1-3 years.
Another important lesson from this generation: while Nintendo showed us that prices don't necessarily need to ever drop, we've now learned that waiting 1-3 years does carry some risk that prices increase. This generation is just bizarre in all the wrong ways.
The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.
Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.
Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.
LucasRuinedChildhood,
For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:
1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.
2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".
"(For nitpickers who want to claim that Microsoft doesn’t control PC gaming: I realize that people do sometimes play games on MacOS and Linux, but those platforms have such a tiny market share that they just don’t matter to big publishers when deciding where to release their games. )"
Microsoft does not control PC gaming and not because of the existence of Mac and Linux. Because Windows is an open platform and becasue of the existence of platforms such as Steam, GOG, EFS, Origin, Uplay, etc. where Microsoft receives none of the revenue and dictates nothing to those companies.
"Putting Microsoft first-party titles on Steam makes it seem like Microsoft is conceding. Is the company really going to swallow its pride and pay tribute to Valve? Is the company ready to accept that, despite its best efforts, it will never control the marketplace on PC?"
lol.....way to just contradict the hell out of your previous statement. So somehow MS controls PC gaming but doesn't control the PC gaming marketplace? Come on. If there is one company who can be described as having the most control over PC gaming it is Steam and that is because of its marketplace.
"I seriously doubt that Microsoft is changing plans due to a change of heart. My guess is that the company is changing strategies not because we didn’t like the old strategy, but because the old strategy wasn’t working. This is the equivalent of “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”"
They are adapting. MS is going to Steam for its marketplace for the same reason Sony may be going to MS for Azure. Because someone else does that job better than they do. Phil Spencer admits they have done a poor job with PC. These are good steps in the right direction.
"The company that made Games for Windows Live is once again promising to serve PC gamers. Based on their track record, I’d feel safer if they went back to ignoring us."
Games for Windows Live? Uh.....a lot has changed since then. Time to move on. Regardless, the fact remains whether MS ignores PC gaming or not, PC gamers are 100% free to ignore MS if they choose to.
Jesus how much did MS pay this site to write this sh*t?
When we play together we all win.
Xbox is going to suck next gen too. Body products instead of games. What a joke.
Microsoft doesn't make a difference when it comes to PC games, they just provide an operating system. Whether they focus on it more or not is irrelevant really, provided they don't break the OS with something stupid (likely). Steam, Origin, etc, etc are the main delivery vehicles for games. They have tried with Games for Windows and the new Windows Store, but its all crap and always will be crap.
What matters is how they focus on their Xbox system, which has been terrible in recent years, because of conflicting priorities.
For MS, as their history shows, the Xbox Console is lost in the woods most of the time. It will do ok for a while, then get kicked aside for some other higher priority project in the company that is being run/pushed by some pet President that currently has the focus of their Board and is getting all the funding. Microsft has a history of running like this, in all divisions for over 15 years now.
This is why the Playstation brand is always better. Sony isn't dealing with conflicting priorities, they need to make a console and games and this is what they do. Sony runs into trouble when they decide to be different and make things like the Cell Processor, but that isn't happening with the PS5.
We might get 2 or 3 years of focused attention out of Microsoft for making better games, but that can and will change and the quality level will drop right after. Disagree? Sure go ahead, but history proves me right.