@thephantompear: This is a very one-sided picture of things. Yes Microsoft has mismanaged studios and closed studios that had a lot of talent, but so has every company. EA is notorious for buying and shuttering studios. I also don't know where you get the idea that Microsoft Games Studios used to be some juggernaut in the early 2000s. They definitely had some well-liked games like Age of Empires, Midtown Madness, and Asheron's Call, but few breakout hits. Also, everyone was abandoning the PC market in the early 2000s because of a variety of issues including World of Warcraft sucking all the oxygen out of the market and piracy screwing up everyone's profits. Steam would revitalize the market in the mid 2000s and now it's more robust and better than ever, but things were pretty dire for awhile.
Microsoft has also been working on building out its first party recently. They brought Halo and Gears in-house from third party studios (Bungie was a first party studio for awhile but it was independent before Microsoft acquired it as opposed to 343, which was built from the ground up to be an MS property.) Turn 10 is among the top racing game studios around and is first party. Microsoft is trying to bring Rare back to life by having them make actual hard core video games as opposed to avatar garbage and Kinect crap. A lot of they "moneyhat" temporary exclusivity deals we've seen recently have been left over from the old regime and just working their way through the pipeline. And MS has invested in new IP this generation too. They launched with Ryse, they put out Sunset Overdrive and Quantum Break (both second party projects, but Sony does lots of second party games as well and gets credit for them. Bloodborne and Until Dawn were both second party, for example.) Those games didn't catch on (though Sunset Overdrive was ridiculously good) but sometimes that just happens. Sony launched Driveclub, which was a broken mess for MONTHS and even when fixed was nowhere near as good as the Forza series, which has launched 4 games this generation (3 of which are amazing, with Forza 5 being kind of poopy).
The idea that Microsoft doesn't innovate is also forgetting history. Achievements and Xbox Live Arcade both helped to fundamentally remake the console market last generation, with XBLA being by far the more important of the two. The PS3 wasn't built with downloadable games in mind, which becomes obvious if you ever actually use a PS3, and trophies had to be patched in. The irony of ID@Xbox being seen as copying Sony's relationship with indie developers is that Microsoft had those relationships first, with XBLA, they just somehow botched a lot of them through mismanagement. But if you look at the first half of the 7th generation you see Microsoft redefined what a console game was in 2005 with XBLA and kept redefining it for the first half of that generation through Summer of Arcade. Summer of Arcade 2008 is still an INSANE lineup almost 10 years later. Geometry Wars 2, Braid, Bionic Commando Rearmed, and Castle Crashers are all games that remain memorable and could be launched today and find audiences.
Where Xbox 360 went wrong was not in courting third parties. It was Kinect. Kinect is the elephant in the room when it comes to Microsoft's console downfall, and it's only not talked about today because it was buried so quickly this gen (though I still have a Kinect.) It was a $500,000,000 launch, sold a bunch of units and then...nobody had any idea of what to do with the thing. None. It's one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen in the video game industry. They created this camera in response to Nintendo's Wii, spent a huge amount to launch it, and never stopped to ask if the thing actually worked OR what kinds of games were good to play on it. I think the only game that I've ever heard positive things about with that thing was the Happy Action Theater thing, which wasn't so much a game as a silly toy application. Kinect didn't work and it wrecked Microsoft's development as they pivoted hard towards it. If you look at Rare for the first half of the 360 gen, for example, you see 1) Kameo: Elements of Spirit, 2) the Viva Pinata games and 3) Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Those were all well-received to some degree or another. They might not have been vintage N64 rare, but they were better than Star Fox Adventures, and the Giant Bomb guys have long argued that Nuts and Bolts was the best Banjo-Kazooie game (and Viva Pinata was great.) There's also Perfect Dark Zero, which is a disaster of a game, but in execution, not concept.
Then, after Kinect, Rare is assigned to make crappy sports games and avatar shit and becomes emblematic of Microsoft's mismanagement. Microsoft also doubled down on Kinect for the 8th generation, despite STILL having no idea what to do with the thing, and despite the fact that it led to them launching a console that was overpriced and underpowered. It was stupid hubris (mixed with terrible messaging about used games, even though their ideas there were actually ahead of their time) and it caused huge damage to the company. There was also relationship mismanagament with third parties and a failure to build new franchises because everyone was working on Kinect crap, but Kinect is really the point where Microsoft goes off the rails. If Xbox were a stand alone company rather than a division of one of the big five tech firms Kinect might be seen like the 32X, only with fewer fun games to play on it.
This became a long rant, but the TL;DR of it is, Kinect is what screwed up Xbox, not the reliance on second party games or shuttering the company that made that worldbeating hit, Freelancer. Microsoft bet huge for two console generations on tech that wasn't ready and they didn't know how to utilize, and has spent the last half-decade trying to dig themselves out of a Kinect shaped hole.
Log in to comment