While I do believe it can be helpful to reduce the burden placed on developers (giving them more time with family, less crunch, shorten development cycles, and significantly reduced budgets by way of less development time and smaller teams per game to increase output), it has the potential to seriously disrupt livelihoods.

I think the people most at risk here are staff at Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Turn 10, and any expansion heavy titles (Diablo, WoW, StarCraft, and 343i. Anything that is a live service or incremental in its iterations are ripe for minimal effort and maximum returns.

Knowing Microsoft, this will be an amazing move for shareholders and executives, and absolutely horrible for labour. Unfortunately, I suspect a skeleton crew with grave pressure to produce new ideas will be milked, then they'll be replaced by trained AI.

As things take shape, I really believe this is Microsoft's Russian roulette moment in the gaming industry: if they are allowed to fulfill their vision with AI and people don't push back, it's game over. Nevermind publisher absorption, I think we're talking about IPs from other manufacturers. An approach with AI-generated content is undoubtedly the most profitable because you have far fewer mouths to feed. Sony and Nintendo would not be able to compete with that output and breadth of content...or, people push back and boycott their products and the AI dream fails spectacularly, which probably gives Microsoft far less incentive to even want to keep things up (how sustainable is it to have these massive publishers and studios with their games on a subscription service if costs keep ballooning?).

Bit of a defining moment. Might be seen as hyperbolic. That's fine. But there needs to be attention paid to reducing the human burden without pulling the rug out. I do not trust Microsoft at all to be decent about this. I expect them to do something horrific, then after a months-long strike, Spencer comes out and says he didn't know this was going on, and they (might) correct course, followed by a price hike to XGP.

A strike in the gaming industry is inevitable.

You can do both with quality standards

Tell me again how the multiplatform strategy was supposed to fix everything. Look at your results and compare them to Nintendo, which keeps thriving with exclusives. Your loyal fans are gone. And let’s not forget the pile of IPs you purchased only to let them rot.

The worst thing is this is down from last years numbers/expectations which was down from the previous years numbers/expectations. You think about how long “down” has been a consistent part of the communication and you realize those subscriptions are what’s holding that boat together. The price cut of gamespass is still a price raise in a string of price raises. They are trying to use players to offset the missing revenue. Now call of duty is out of gamespass, which is literally WHY they bought the company. To draw people to the subscription. They realized they missed a boatload of money and that wasn’t sustainable. Now you pay for it like you would have if they never bought the company… so why buy the company? Mind you those billions still need to be paid back. Yeah it gives you a chance to say we make the biggest FPS… but the internal conversations must be brutal at high level on topics that really matter. Like revenue. Profitability. And ROI for the shopping spree.

Is this like the 10th quarter in a row they're down 33% on hardware how is that even mathematically possible. You would think their mediocrity would Plateau