Amid the official statements and many tweets that followed one of the biggest shakeups ever at Xbox, one of its creators believes Microsoft’s true plan is to bring its gaming business to an end.
Seamus Blackley co-created Xbox at Microsoft, bringing to life Microsoft’s console hardware in 2001 before leaving just a year later. He has watched his former company hit the headlines as Phil Spencer and would-be successor Sarah Bond announced their exit. And in a new interview, he revealed what he believes to be new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s actual mission — which sounds like nothing good for Xbox fans.
Speaking to GamesBeat, Blackley said that Xbox is not a core part of Microsoft’s all-encompassing AI push, and so “is being sunsetted.” Drafting in Sharma, who Blackley points out came from Microsoft’s AI team with no gaming background, is further evidence of the company’s true strategy, he claimed. “They don’t say that, but that’s what’s happening,” he went on. “I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.”
In some sense this has been coming since the Xbox One.
In another sense this has been coming since around 1996.
The central goal of the Xbox project was always to computerify the console market. This has now happened, to such an extent that platforms are basically interchangeable. That irrelevance wasn’t part of the plan. Microsoft assumed they’d own everything. At present they’re not even the best way to play Windows games, let alone the leading source of Windows software. Whoops.
Regardless of those details - there’s not much point pretending that console hardware is distinct or important. Sony makes a nice AMD laptop, basically identical to Microsoft’s own AMD laptop, for the second generation running. For some reason, people strongly prefer the blue one. Nintendo ditched fifteen years of technological planning to rebrand an Nvidia Shield and print money by making it the only portable with buttons. Still not sure how that market was untapped. Even now, their only serious competition is literally a whole-ass PC. All these machines run all the same games that don’t star Mario Mario or John Halo.
I have been expecting Microsoft to stop participating in the console launch cycle since I thought their next one would be named the Xbox Two. I’m not sure why they’re still coy about bowing out of the hardware market. If it’s making them money, they can just… continue. But then it’s weird for them to let rumors swirl like this. Nobody’s come out and said, Xbox stronk, Xbox one thousand years, Xbox forever. In classic Microsoft fashion the right hand knows not what the left hand is doing, and the right hand’s not sure either.
They’ve sat on the fence long enough that there’s definitely going to be a PS6. If they’d called the-- fuck is this one called? If they’d called the Series series the final Xbox, a year after launch, they might’ve shaken that up. But now Sony’s no doubt years deep in planning, and would gladly take a victory lap as the home console. But it’s never gonna be like the PS1 again. That’s the dream every time, and it kinda worked with the PS2, but everything since has been mere competition. Even that narrative might flop when the alternatives are portable and/or a full computer.
The argument for Microsoft staying in, at least one more time, is that hardware’s kinda fucky. Intel had a great entry into the GPU market, just in time for their CPU division to mortally wound the entire company. Nvidia’s convinced their infinite money glitch cannot go tits-up. AMD’s making enough on industrial supply that they could almost buy their fabs back, but is somehow still second place in both their home markets. Microsoft may not bet on people’s ability to shop for a home computer circa 2028. The console business model is ‘I have to sell you this so I can sell you these,’ and we might get dragged into another seven years of that, before we can stop pretending the console war still matters.
I think the news about how badly the division was doing was probably the final nail but they had so much invested they didn’t QUITE want to pull the plug just yet. Didn’t want to spook the investors.
Yeah I was smelling something fishy with the former Instacart AI boss promising the “return of Xbox”. If they don’t outright kill the brand in the next couple years, they’ll continue the death by 1000 cuts.