This was the best Xbox showcase in years (and the hardest to root for)

AND campaign This looks like an Adam Curtis documentary prequel introducing fans to E-Day and the birth of the series’ iconic “Lancer” chainsaw, in addition to a trailer showing not only is he still alivepotentially blooming. Microsoft’s summer presentation for 2024 was the best the Xbox had looked since the Xbox One. But this comes at an enormous cost, which the company doesn’t seem ready to admit publicly.

Insiders have been raising interest in the presentation for several days, partly because the full list of disclosures and announcements has already been leaked to some media and others. Fans were already furious, expecting Xbox to finally turn the corner, just for football to be dragged out of the field once more and realizing that the platform was still in one other of its inevitable “recovery” years. The proof is at all times in the games themselves, and their effectiveness can only be truly assessed once they’re in the hands of players. For now, though, the presentation has been delivered.

There were over sixty minutes of games small and huge, offering every part from zombie survival to nostalgic teen hangouts, punctuated by massive first-party games and third-party teases. If you own an Xbox Series X/S console, there’s plenty to play this yr and next. Xbox gaming studios lead Matt Booty’s long-running promise of a consistent variety of quarterly Xbox games price appearing in may finally come true. The only thing missing from this event was accountability for what and who Microsoft sacrificed to get here.

Just over a month has passed since the company’s announcement closes three studios and reorganizes the fourth. One of the victims, Tango Gameworks and is the hit of 2023 , seemed to symbolize the best of Xbox in the Game Pass era: a highly stylized passion project from a more moderen team that wowed critics and won awards, and would not have been possible without the “let a thousand flowers bloom” strategy behind the platform go to a subscription library similar to Netflix. But in a devastating turnaround, the deep-pocketed tech giant has parted ways with the team together with renowned immersive sim creators Arkane Austin and others. According to internal comments from Booty and the head of parent company Zenimax, there was simply not enough bandwidth for one in every of the three Most worthy corporations in the world to manage so many studios.

The bad news and nonsense explanations wouldn’t have fallen like a lead balloon if Microsoft had not announced mass layoffs in several departments just a number of months earlier, including the newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The cuts affected everyone from the team to developers Sledgehammer Games and included the cancellation of , a fantasy survival game that would have develop into Blizzard’s first latest franchise in nearly a decade. Microsoft spent $69 billion on the acquisition, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer visited the Activision Blizzard King offices shortly after the deal closed last fall, after which in early 2024 the mask got here off.

In interviews with and , Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer blames the heel activate a mix of investor pressure and a stagnant console gaming market. In other words: capitalism. But completely shutting down Tango Gameworks, originally founded by director Shinji Mikami to train a brand new generation of creators, seemed particularly capricious. The Xbox team didn’t mention the developers it fired or their contributions in its remarks to the live audience before today’s presentation or during the pre-recorded event itself. (Even after learning his fate, Arkane Austin worked hard to post a much needed final update.)

Instead, Spencer opened the presentation promoting the company’s desire to bring one in every of its hottest franchises to much more gamers through the power of a $17/month subscription. This was perhaps unsurprising given the billions Microsoft paid to acquire the series, but the decision to open the series in this fashion underscored a brand new reality for the Xbox brand, which now must return a return worthy of all those investments. “I haven’t talked about it publicly because now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals.” Spencer said later that dayaway from the a whole lot of 1000’s of fans watching the show.

He continued:

It’s obviously a really difficult decision for them and I would like to make certain, through departures and other things, that we do the right thing for the individual people in the team. It’s not about my PR, it isn’t about Xbox’s PR. It’s about these teams. After all, as I actually have said again and again, I actually have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that implies that sometimes I actually have to make difficult decisions that, truthfully, usually are not decisions that I like, but decisions that somebody has to make.

Meanwhile, the presentation didn’t even explain itself the bar set a number of days earlier by Geoff Keighley during the Game Awards host’s presentation. Xbox CEO Sarah Bond, who he responded with a word salad of corpo when asked about the studio’s closure last month, he closed the Xbox presentation by pointing to the future fairly than dwelling on the recent past. “Our mission is to make Xbox the best place to play by including games from our own studios on Game Pass at launch, to take gaming into the future with our commitment to game preservation, to push the boundaries in our future hardware, and to enable you to play games, wherever you want, on Xbox, PC and in the cloud,” she said. “This is what defines Xbox today and in the future, and that’s why we’re working hard on the next generation.”

This was a pledge intended to reassure fans who are still reeling from the shock of the recent changes to the franchise’s history. But the future is built on the past, and every new shiny Xbox game now raises the question of what happens to the teams Microsoft has bought or partnered with when they no longer feel like they’re serving its bottom line.

IGN