Daniel

>it's now all but confirmed that Todd specifically told Xbox they shouldn't let Obsidian make a new Fallout game when Phil was in charge >Asha said lol no and Fallout is now also an Obsidian IP You just know Todd is PISSED

The problem with arguing Christian morality is that you’ll see basic human behavior and Christians pretend they invented it

This is an important email I sent today to all employees at XBOX: Team, We are beginning the most significant restructure in XBOX history. After careful consideration, I've made the difficult decision to reduce our team by approximately 3,200 throughout FY27. This will include approximately 1,600 role eliminations today, and in addition, four studios will leave XBOX to new management. I recognize that a year-long restructuring creates additional challenges. Unfortunately, it is not possible to make all the necessary changes in a single day, and I wanted to be direct about the scale. I know this is painful. These changes will directly affect people who have poured their creativity into building XBOX. Many joined us through acquisitions, while others were recruited here, or sought us out because they loved this industry and loved XBOX. Today's decisions do not reflect their talent or dedication. Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We entered Gen 9 with a smaller install base and a higher cost structure. To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history. We must reset XBOX. First, we will reset our content portfolio. Since 2018, we have aggressively expanded our studio portfolio while the number of games created each month across the industry now outpaces the last ten years combined. We now find ourselves competing not only with the largest publishers, but also with smaller independent studios. It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested. As we reset XBOX, we will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision. Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to management and transition to independent studios with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3. In France, Arkane’s management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options. We are also making reductions across other units, and in some cases, shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. These changes vary in size across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and XBOX Game Studios. None of our first party publicly announced games or projects are being cancelled as part of these reductions. In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me. These two studios have increasingly become platforms and are our largest by monthly active players. They bring critical geographic, demographic, and differentiation to XBOX. Second, we will reset our platform. We know that great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger. Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. Our platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and playtime have declined. That complexity has slowed decisions, blurred accountability, and made it harder to deliver for players. As we reset XBOX, we will simplify. We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3. We will deliver success through a flatter organization that is built around makers (individual contributors focused on building), player-coaches (leaders who remain deeply involved in the work while developing their teams), and directly responsible individuals (DRIs) who own key decisions and outcomes. And we will streamline how we work across our tools, with a cleaner code base, shared services, and 50% reduced vendor spend. Third, we are resetting how we operate. As XBOX grew our headcount, we became more fragmented. Teams, studios, and functions often operate independently, and it became harder to work towards a shared goal, make the right tradeoffs, and get things done. For the first time, we are establishing a Chief Operating Officer with end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services. Helen Chiang has been promoted to this role and will report directly to me. Over nearly two decades at XBOX, Helen has helped build some of our most important businesses, from XBOX Live to leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise. She will bring our businesses together under one operating model, making sure we make clear investment decisions, learn from our successes and failures, and hold ourselves accountable for results. Thank you, Dave McCarthy, who is retiring after 17 years with XBOX. Dave has played a defining role in building the platform that millions of players rely on every day and has been a trusted partner through many of the biggest moments in XBOX's history. We wish him all the best. These changes are about a bigger future for XBOX, not a smaller one. The next decade of gaming will be larger, more global, and more creative than anything we've seen before. This year, we'll invest as much in XBOX as we ever have, but we'll invest with greater focus, greater discipline, and greater clarity, all in service of making XBOX where the world plays and creates. I want XBOX to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect. I know we can achieve this goal. XBOX has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history, talented studios around the world, and we will return to growth in 2027. History is full of companies that mistake longevity for inevitability. We will not be one of them. Asha

Asmongold defends himself after facing backlash for his opinion on Sony's PlayStation decision to move away from physical media 👀😳 “People are getting a false sense of security about owning the piece of plastic, as if that actually gives them any privilege. You can still be software locked. Please do not miss the forest from the trees. The holy grail is consumer protections laws and regulations. Please stop thinking that because you own a disc, you have any sort of immutable right over the copyrighted content that you own. You can dog on me and shit on me and try to discredit me with everything else, but please do not lose sight of the end goal, which is better consumer protections, because nothing else will solve this problem”

F*ck pirates, as a man who designed video games from 1988 through 2012. 70-90% of Doom's players pirated it. If not for that we would literally have had so much more for our workspace and upcoming projects - Quake may not have gutted id Software. At least 50% of Age of Empires was pirated which helped lead to our MicroSoft buyout and eventual demise. And your excuses of "we have to try before we buy" are complete bullsh*t. Doom let you play a full 9 levels free. Age of Empires let you play a battle free to see how it worked. We bent over backwards to ensure you'd know what you were getting into. Damn pirates are the guys who killed game companies. like Atari, Amiga, Cinemaware, 3D Realms (Duke Nukem!) And if you're NOT a pirate, I salute you. You are a gentleman and if you ever see me at a convention, walk up and say, "Hey Sandy, I never pirated a game." and I'll buy you a drink.

The people defending the new Fable with sword and shield have genuinely started to annoy me because they pick and choose which parts of the IP are sacred and which parts deserve to be erased. Remove the binary morality system and the appearance changes tied to alignment, and suddenly anyone complaining is told those mechanics were outdated, terrible, and nobody liked them anyway. "It's a reboot. Stop comparing it to the originals." But when the game starts promising things like 1,000+ "unique" NPCs (something that will almost certainly end up undercooked at launch) it's suddenly not a problem. In fact, that's apparently a beloved Fable tradition. Overpromising impossible features is faithful to the spirit of the originals. So which is it? Is this a reboot that shouldn't be compared to the old games, or is it Fable through and through whenever it's convenient?