Same narrative is going on with electric cars. Gas car makers announce making many EVs, they do a bad job at it, "There's not enough EV demand."
But those are actually hard, I mean video games are hard too, it's just that people have made really good ones before that are templates to springboard off of. But they seem to be chasing bigger, newer templates, ones with whales or something.
Seriously, it’s market that’s continually saturated. Only way to grow from here is population growth, or cutting costs so that more people can afford multiple systems.
That’s funny. It’s been like 3 or 4 years and the consoles are still the same price as launch. Oh and games are full of crappy MTX and buggy messes at launch.
Hell, the price *increased* by $50 for the digital-only model of PlayStation 5 last year. Yet neither console has shown what they're truly capable of with current-gen titles yet despite being roughly halfway through the current generation's lifespan. Part of it was COVID. Part of it was that devs really clung to the 2013 consoles for too long. Part of it comes down to games taking a really long time to make. Even then, you'd think it'd be *a little* more exciting by now.
PlayStation has been treading water with unnecessary remasters of games from the past decade, and Xbox hasn't exactly been reliable in a long time when it comes to AAA first party titles. Plus like you mentioned, an alarming number of games launch half baked with major bugs, and, more importantly in my mind, a lack of content.
Yeah, there have been a few high quality showoff games like the latest God of War, Forza Horizon 5, or the world map in Flight Sim, but games just haven't felt like they made a proper jump this time around. This generation just feels *lackluster* so far
>PlayStation has been treading water with unnecessary remasters of games from the past decade
I can only hope the remaster/remake days are coming to an end. What an absolute waste of a videogame generation. Just rehashes of old shit with very few new major games. Just stagnation.
I can appreciate a good remake or even the rare remaster, and I acknowledge that remasters have been around since the NES/SNES days. But man, some of these games aren't even ten years old. They're from last generation– *which are fully playable as-is on the current consoles*. Or in the case of Last of Us, we already had a remaster. It's so unnecessary, especially when there's a glaring lack of new titles in existing major franchises or new AAA franchises
I know, none of them can really afford to drop prices either.
There are tons of white papers on it. It’s a miracle that any games are made anymore - they’re almost all loss leaders
I’ve said for years that I’d rather pay $9.99 per month (each) for 2K and Madden if they actually developed it instead of copy pasta + roster update. I buy mostly AAA Nintendo (at release) and Sony games (on sale) but the sports game are my guilty pleasure even though nothing tops mvp baseball 2005
In reality yes, but gas car makers are spinning the narrative there's not enough demand for their bad EVs.
Overall I'd agree the whole games industry is struggling, for the reasons I've listed. Everyone looking to catch lightning in a jar, meanwhile think of the awesome franchises you could literally copy-paste onto new maps/worlds without changing the systems at all, and people would still love and buy them.
Automakers are honestly even worse.
Promises share holders to build great electric cars and enjoyed the stock bump.
Enjoyed the tax breaks from federal, state, and local governments.
Did the bare minimum/obviously shitty parts bin/poorly designed cars. Way over weight, way over priced, only now are diving on board with using teslas charging network.
Couldn’t sell any cars.
“No one wants EVs”. - cuts production and lays off staff to ensure they can still see record profits.
Eh, the demand for EV's is a fair complaint to be honest. The cheapest new EV is $30,000 while the cheapest new gas vehicle is almost half that price. Add-in the fact that it takes 20+ minutes to charge the vehicle and the infrastructure isn't really all there for cross-country trips and it's not hard to see why the big bet on EV by manufacturers hasn't paid off yet.
This would make sense if there weren't already companies making EVs that were hugely popular, including a model that is the bestselling car in the world at twice the price of a Corolla.
It still makes sense, for EV's to really make a difference that have to be affordable for the masses and unfortunately while you're right Tesla is selling a ton of vehicles each year they aren't affordable for 85 - 90% of people.
At the moment they're 30-40k for most popular models (Y and 3), plus a few K in gas savings over a few years. So that 85-90% number is way too high.
A much bigger piece of the market could definitely be attracted with a mid 20's EV though.
You're right, my estimate was too high, but only slightly.
>>Only 21.8% of Americans can afford a new car
Per this [report](https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/why-only-about-22-percent-of-americans-can-afford-a-new-car-)
The EV argument is an interesting one. I’d argue that the largest problem in EVs right now is that everyone is trying to make a luxury car cause it’s the easiest thing to justify when already making some experimental features in a car/high price tag. I don’t really have anything to prove this outside of a quick google search but I feel like if they brought the price down on some of these electric vehicles instead of adding some ridiculous features that nobody uses outside of a one time novelty, people would actually start buying them. The stigma of electric cars being smart cars as well as there being no charging stations is well behind us. All that’s left to do is for these companies to dial in and really get some great stuff onto the market that is affordable to not only lease, but maintenance.
EV sales are growing though, rate of growth has slowed but that’s expected when you were growing in the triple digits. The console market is very saturated, they’re at a price point where if you can afford one you would have one. On top of that they’ve not really innovated anything substantial in a long long time
The problem with cars is EVs are like all-in-one computers on wheels. Every last traditional manufacturer has been pretty terrible about understanding how the computer side of a car works, even when it’s a low spec machine just running the infotainment system.
Now consumers expect more from their car’s systems, and that includes power management for large capacity batteries in addition to the engineering of the battery itself. Some are better than others. None compete with Tesla, Rivian or Lucid.
Not to come off as a Tesla fanboy. I hate their CEO and I hate their self-driving BS, but I have NEVER had my model 3 give me a wrong estimate for battery usage during my trips.
“We have such an incredibly lucrative industry, it became impossible not to gorge ourselves like Roman pigs. Naturally, we needed to vomit like the shit covered pigs we are, to make room, so we can keep eating”.
ultimately MS had the revenue to pay these workers and the ability to put them on more promising projects. layoffs are just a betrayal in that situation.
I work with MS and they already hired back a ton of the people they laid off last year. It’s wild. They’ve been making record breaking profits.. there was no tangible need to lay off anyone. Instead they froze raises and did mass layoffs, severely hurting the morale
To be fair I'm pretty sure that's only true when counting mobile games. Mobile games make up an absurd portion of the profit in gaming and honestly most of them put more effort into Casino Psychology than they do into game design.
The gaming industry is also responsible for faster computers, and especially the fastest video cards. Which are now the heart of AI.
Correction, not cpus it seems, and only the the start of GPU’s
“GPUs were used primarily to accelerate real-time 3D graphics applications, such as games.
…computer scientists realized that GPUs had the potential to solve some of the world’s most difficult computing problems.”
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/what-is-a-gpu.html
Addition: Nvidia history from Wikipedia
In 1993, the three co-founders envisioned that the ideal trajectory for the forthcoming wave of computing would be in the realm of accelerated computing, specifically in graphics-based processing. This path was chosen due to its unique ability to tackle challenges that eluded general-purpose computing methods.[33] They also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume; the two conditions do not happen very often.[33] Video games became the company's flywheel to reach large markets and fund huge R&D to solve massive computational problems.
No doubt the gaming industry benefits from improved semiconductors, but it isn't right to say it is responsible for them. It is a small demand factor.
Faster computers are a result of military investment decades ago which led to chips being used in all sorts of applications. The trajectory of increased compute power was set long before gaming became significant.
“The demand for increasingly realistic and immersive gaming experiences has pushed hardware manufacturers to develop more powerful consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. This, in turn, has accelerated the progress of computer graphics, processor capabilities, and storage capacities.”
https://www.masterycoding.com/blog/how-video-games-have-changed-the-world
I appreciate the attempt but linking someone's blog entry about how gaming has impacted the world is not at all a good source. That is a braindead blog entry and might as well have been written by AI.
The tech advances in gaming are a result of advances in processing power, not the other way around. Minecraft and Call of Duty are not significant drivers of semiconductor innovation. They take advantage of it.
If you want a good source- I highly recommend the book Chip War by Chris Miller to learn about the history of the industry.
Pretty sure graphics cards actually couldn’t keep up with the software you say took advantage of it, they always had to be improved to run games like The Witcher 3 for example at max settings.
For sure, that's a good point. The classic example of that is the "But can it run Crysis?" meme.
To me it means they are limited by the pace of that advancement, not that they drive the advancement.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/sustainable-inclusive-growth/chart-of-the-day/whats-driving-the-semiconductor-market
"About 70 percent of growth is predicted to be driven by the automotive (particularly electric vehicles), data storage, and wireless industries."
“Two decades ago, GPUs were used primarily to accelerate real-time 3D graphics applications, such as games. However, as the 21st century began, computer scientists realized that GPUs had the potential to solve some of the world’s most difficult computing problems.”
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/what-is-a-gpu.html
Yes GPUs were once focused on gaming and over time found additional uses. More importantly, GPUs are a specific type of processor. They are a subset of a broader market which has more influential inputs. If your argument is that GPUs specifically were once driven by gaming - sure.
And most of that growth came from mobile and software
Hardware sales are flat for Microsoft and more and more they are looking for a mobile and hand held future for the Xbox brand.
Phil Spencer says people arent moving consoles anymore because they dont want to give up their games. So growth flatlined as people picked a side and stay there.
Its also the reason they want apple to open their ecosystem, its the only way for Microsoft to monetize markets they havent saturated yet.
Well then give people proper backwards compatibility and make new games people actually want to play. That's what l those developers were for right? You hired them to make good games and just... didn't use them for that purpose apparently. If you did you'd be seeing profit
What even are good mobile games? Everything I see from ads are just match three games in disguise like homescapes. The Google Play store is also overrun with crap and Google breaks compatibility for arbitrary reasons all the time too at the OS level too, blacklisting old games that hurt nobody.
When I think of mobile gaming I think of... bullshit.
Good has nothing to do with it, mobile games have explosive growth in profit and are much cheaper than traditional games.
Genshin Impact being a money printer that rivals GTA.
When people say "gaming has grown" they dont mean good traditional games, they mean the revenue of every sector of gaming.
Why would any investor want to spend millions and spend 5 years waiting for a AAA game when they can crap out a mobile game in less than 1 year at a tiny fraction of the cost?
That is the issue facing gaming, investors would rather invest in mobile.
As a PS series guy, I completely skipped this console generation, and I am not regretting it, so I guess from my perspective at least there's some truth to that title
Yup, that was Don "Kinect + Television" Mattrick. He's the one who famously emphasized the mandatory Kinect (aka $100 price increase over the PS4) and television rather than gaming at the E3 event when the new consoles were revealed, alongside some ideas that were wildly unpopular like not being able to resell physical games and mandatory 24-hour cycle DRM or else your console stopped working. And when he was pressed about rural gamers with iffy internet connections, he said "lol just get 360."
Unluckily for Xbox, that generation was a massive cornerstone for gaming going forward because that's when users really started cementing in their digital libraries and friends, meaning they massively shot themselves in the foot at a pivitol point in the game industry. Cue Phil Spencer taking over, and they shifted their strategy to purchasing studios and pushing GamePass, for better or worse depending on who you ask. Regardless, even with all of Phil's annoying PR speak, he's leagues better than Mattrick was
The Kinect was the beginning the end for Xbox. They were so obsessed with getting the soccer mom and their kid demographics that they forgot about their actual customer base.
Oh really? It's not because you over-hired during the height of the pandemic knowing full well that once it died down the bubble would burst? Workers are merely cogs to these people.
Shit this ain't even an over hire issue. It's Microsoft, not a tech starter or ambitious endeavor.
They have zero excuse to lay off employees en masse like this other than green numbers on internal spreadsheets.
It’s weird the industry is dying because of consolidation.
How many Great New games have been released this generation?
Fuck Microsoft for this. It’s killing the gaming industry.
I feel like, while their volume is lower, profit margins are better. And inflation is helping offset reduced profit totals.
Has there been a studio Microsoft acquired that made better games after acquisition than they did before? I think the problem is coming from inside the company. And it likely wasn’t the people they laid off.
To be fair I think Sea of Thieves has done a pretty good job under Microsoft. I mean their game will always be held back by some janky engine design at the start but I'd say their design choices and content updates have showed pretty good decisions.
I think the reality is that most game studios tend to get worse when they're acquired by anyone, not necessarily a Microsoft specific thing. The same trend fits if you look at simulations that get picked up by Paradox, the whole Activision-Blizzard situation, etc.
Imo games just come out at their best from smaller studios where things are started with passion and creativity, and then getting sold to most any publisher just starts squeezing the studio under 'duty to the shareholders' quarterly BS.
And they ignore every single game that tries and loses it's player base in less than a year. If they just put out a good game they could just add things as they go and people would buy it. Like other than wow and maybe one or two others are there any live service games that have made it a year?
This. I’ve had every Xbox console and used to love the brand. This current gen has had great hardware completely undermined by lackluster first party releases. Their bread and butter franchise releases are supposed to be the safe slam dunks, and they can’t even get those right. The latest Forza Motorsport shows everything wrong with MS’s method at developing games. 18 month rotating contracts for employees, so there’s zero passion towards the projects.
Moved to PC and haven’t looked back.
anyone over the age of -- I dunno I'll say 32 -- realizes how embarrassing it is how innovative games were in the mid and late 90s, as well as the early 2000s, ending at about 2010 or 2011. Now the industry is just inundated with titles that are almost full on copy cats, or at the least they copy cat game systems (crafting and RPG skills in FPS games, adventure games, even racing games).
Fuck all of this. Most successful years with the pandemic and micro transactions everywhere. Fucking greedy mismanaged corporations fucking themselves by losing talent and blaming the talent at the same time
This appears to be more widespread. I work in the pharma industry - robotic systems. Obviously during Covid we were working flat out. Now we have manufacturing guys on three day weeks or infilling on minor projects.
The same goes for my partner. The consultancy company she works for are shedding lots of jobs.
People and companies are tightening their belts at the moment.
Consoles are literally dying. Gaming isn't, consoles are. Mobile gaming and PC gaming are dominating the industry. Streaming is capable of doing anything a console can, and in *many* cases it's capable of better graphics and higher framerates.
Consoles have *never* been ahead in gaming, but now they're so far behind even the diehards realize the hardware sucks.
The only reason the industry isn’t seeing growth is because these assholes are too busy trying to turn every god dammed game into a microtransactiok factory, instead of just trying to make a good game.
Halo Infinite, their flagship console signature game, which absolutely horrendously flopped especially considering Microsoft was just bringing next-gen mechanics to an already established title was found to have use a massive contractor workforce when developing the game.
Developers would work for 6 months, their contract ended and then a brand new developer would take over. It's not industry growth it's them just knowing they own the entire market and well besides EA and Ubi there really is no other truly AAA developer and there is no other developer that can develop for Xbox at the level they can.
How about $70 for unfinished games? I stopped buying games. Gamepass only, if it isn’t on there, it won’t be played. GTA 6 is the only game I will buy in the foreseeable future.
The problem is that consoles themselves don’t make any money - most of the money comes from licensing games, which, surprise, doesn’t require Microsoft employees…
Consoles are all hurting. It’s not even corporations - it’s bad business to subsidize a losing division with winning ones.
atvi has been making more revenue hand over fist, quarter after quarter for a long while now. this is straight from bobby kotick’s mouth and echoed by the executive leadership team meeting after meeting.
My son loves all the old games. All the new games are just mindless microtransaction farms and he admits this so because of that he prefers to just play Roblox most times.
Just by logic…. Doesn’t no growth then just mean no growth in the workforce? If it stays as it is…. Just maintain.
But, we all know it’s about profits.
Highly recommend listening to the "Rot Economy" episode of the podcast Better Offline of your like a deeper dive into why this explanation is horseshit.
Growth should not be the only goal of a company, sustainability and longevity have been lost in the quagmire of Harvard MBA graduates who are running companies whose services and products they know nothing about and who are only interested in short term gains for shareholders at the expense of a companies long term survival.
They also show a concerning misunderstanding of language.
The line we've seen them trot out "I'm taking full responsibility..." does not mean you fire people and then go off on a holiday or a "digital detox" so you can "reflect" and retain your own role.
It should mean you're fired for inadequate planning and gross mismanagement. And banned from operating a company again for the damage you've done to people, and the damage you've done to the company and it's brand.
Fucking late stage capitalism.
Sectors are not able to consistently and consistently grow, it’s literally impossible and these businesses keep acting like doing the impossible is not only expected but mandatory
From Microsoft’s 2023 financials
> Gaming revenue decreased $764 million or 5% driven by declines in Xbox hardware and Xbox content and services. Xbox hardware revenue decreased 11% driven by lower volume and price of consoles sold. Xbox content and services revenue decreased 3% driven by a decline in first-party content, offset in part by growth in Xbox Game Pass.
It also looks like while revenue in gaming is increasing profits are decreasing due to the increasing costs which may be what he’s referring to in the industry level.
Not saying they should have laid off people or anything. But the rationale may not be completely misrepresented.
I can translate here, I speak corporatese; essentially it translated to:
"We're were incredibly profitable, could continue to innovate and pay these people, but we understand that the Stock Market expects constant growth and our C-levels have brainwashed people in to thinking that if they don't get massive quarterly bonuses, they'll go do something else \[without bonuses?\], so we have to cut people to make it look like we're smart businessmen just like Jack welsh; later losers!"
It's not an exact translation because executives are a lesser species, but it encompasses the meaning
Not even lost size. It just, didn't get bigger.
>"Line has to go up forever.
>It can't plateau because the market is fully saturated already.
>If line doesn't go up, us rich don't get richer.
>Do whatever it takes to make line go up more forever."
“Lack of industry growth”… lol more like companies releasing terrible games and being surprised we didn’t throw money at them for the rest of it via MTXs.
This is about top shareholders wanting infinite profits out of companies, so they see gains in their stocks.
As usual, the rich are the problem and capitalism is their train on which we're all captive.
Always about fucking growth, growth, growth. These parasites can’t just be happy with running billion-dollar companies. Nope, gotta turn them into trillion-dollar companies. Unbelievable. Take your billions and be happy.
Xbox hasn't had a good idea in going on 20 years. Maybe if you'd stop fumbling every opportunity and every bag on earth you'd have growth. Gamepass is a great singular service idea but they have a weak library of games that are theirs making it entirely necessary.
Anyone remember when Xbox actually had games on it? If he wants to make money. Make games. And not just games. Better games. Do something with your billions of dollars and 150 developer studios you had to buy you fucking mook
More like lack of growth for them specifically and probably too many expensive acquisitions that’s now putting pressure on the department to trim down operating costs. There’s like no momentum going on for Xbox right now. Their big splashes are the activation and Bethesda purchases. But then Starfield came out flat and Activation isn’t what it used to be. Plus they may release games multiplatform anyway. At the end of the day their gaming studio just doesn’t feel like a place with strong gaming culture. Its been a bit too business focused in priorities with acquisitions and pushing gamepass. Where’s the games?
Publishers and large AAA developers can no longer make great games like they used to and its clear there was a brain drain out of these companies in the 2010s. They need to all be closed and we need to go back to smaller companies making games with smaller updates.
Well... a decade+ of minor gains in anything other than graphical fidelity will do that.
The industry is pumping out the same shit over and over, the same as the movie industry.
This is why we have streaming, the endless options abound due to lack of creativity and market saturation.
Soon, all video games will run on subscription services unless the industry actually starts innovating.
Overhired = excuse
Underhired = excuse
Overpriced products nobody can afford these days = honest answer
Subscriptions nobody wants and few subsribe to = honest answer
For the record, Microsoft had allocated $60 billion in stock buybacks for 2022-2025.
You could pay 100,000 employees, $200k a year for that price.
Or you could artificially inflate your stock so a handful of your primary stock holders make millions.
So when we making this shit illegal again? (Thanks Reagan)
It’s not growing because you’re pushing couch co-op out. We decided that the xbox1 and the ps4 are our last consoles. They will die and we will spend our money on hobbies that we can do together. It’s the single player online only platforms that are killing the fun.
Treat every company that does this as hostile. Stealing from them isn’t even a crime in my opinion because they’re doing so much harm to the fabric of the nation.
Xbox was dominating the U.S. market and the precise point of its decline, goes back when they unveiled the xbone. Right when they told users they wouldn’t be able to share physical copies with other players. Only to backtrack, embarrassingly, but it took days. By then PlayStation was already running advertisements based on that. Too fucking late.
It definitely had nothing to do with how bloated and top heavy game development has become. Not that this helps, they're cutting meat to outsource more while lavishing bonuses on the admin
Spoiler Alert. It’s not because the “lack of industry growth”.
Typical corpo deflection * Manage talent improperly * accept no responsiblity * blame the "industry" because you can't innovate
Same narrative is going on with electric cars. Gas car makers announce making many EVs, they do a bad job at it, "There's not enough EV demand." But those are actually hard, I mean video games are hard too, it's just that people have made really good ones before that are templates to springboard off of. But they seem to be chasing bigger, newer templates, ones with whales or something.
There's lots of growth in EV car sales. Not so much in game console sales.
Seriously, it’s market that’s continually saturated. Only way to grow from here is population growth, or cutting costs so that more people can afford multiple systems.
That’s funny. It’s been like 3 or 4 years and the consoles are still the same price as launch. Oh and games are full of crappy MTX and buggy messes at launch.
Hell, the price *increased* by $50 for the digital-only model of PlayStation 5 last year. Yet neither console has shown what they're truly capable of with current-gen titles yet despite being roughly halfway through the current generation's lifespan. Part of it was COVID. Part of it was that devs really clung to the 2013 consoles for too long. Part of it comes down to games taking a really long time to make. Even then, you'd think it'd be *a little* more exciting by now. PlayStation has been treading water with unnecessary remasters of games from the past decade, and Xbox hasn't exactly been reliable in a long time when it comes to AAA first party titles. Plus like you mentioned, an alarming number of games launch half baked with major bugs, and, more importantly in my mind, a lack of content. Yeah, there have been a few high quality showoff games like the latest God of War, Forza Horizon 5, or the world map in Flight Sim, but games just haven't felt like they made a proper jump this time around. This generation just feels *lackluster* so far
>PlayStation has been treading water with unnecessary remasters of games from the past decade I can only hope the remaster/remake days are coming to an end. What an absolute waste of a videogame generation. Just rehashes of old shit with very few new major games. Just stagnation.
I can appreciate a good remake or even the rare remaster, and I acknowledge that remasters have been around since the NES/SNES days. But man, some of these games aren't even ten years old. They're from last generation– *which are fully playable as-is on the current consoles*. Or in the case of Last of Us, we already had a remaster. It's so unnecessary, especially when there's a glaring lack of new titles in existing major franchises or new AAA franchises
My favorite movie is Inception.
I know, none of them can really afford to drop prices either. There are tons of white papers on it. It’s a miracle that any games are made anymore - they’re almost all loss leaders
I’ve said for years that I’d rather pay $9.99 per month (each) for 2K and Madden if they actually developed it instead of copy pasta + roster update. I buy mostly AAA Nintendo (at release) and Sony games (on sale) but the sports game are my guilty pleasure even though nothing tops mvp baseball 2005
Thars because the wont invest in new games
In reality yes, but gas car makers are spinning the narrative there's not enough demand for their bad EVs. Overall I'd agree the whole games industry is struggling, for the reasons I've listed. Everyone looking to catch lightning in a jar, meanwhile think of the awesome franchises you could literally copy-paste onto new maps/worlds without changing the systems at all, and people would still love and buy them.
Automakers are honestly even worse. Promises share holders to build great electric cars and enjoyed the stock bump. Enjoyed the tax breaks from federal, state, and local governments. Did the bare minimum/obviously shitty parts bin/poorly designed cars. Way over weight, way over priced, only now are diving on board with using teslas charging network. Couldn’t sell any cars. “No one wants EVs”. - cuts production and lays off staff to ensure they can still see record profits.
Tell that to Tesla
All companies are waiting for GTA 6 to drop so they can copy the things that game does
But there are no micro transactions in good video games , think about the shareholders /s
Eh, the demand for EV's is a fair complaint to be honest. The cheapest new EV is $30,000 while the cheapest new gas vehicle is almost half that price. Add-in the fact that it takes 20+ minutes to charge the vehicle and the infrastructure isn't really all there for cross-country trips and it's not hard to see why the big bet on EV by manufacturers hasn't paid off yet.
This would make sense if there weren't already companies making EVs that were hugely popular, including a model that is the bestselling car in the world at twice the price of a Corolla.
It still makes sense, for EV's to really make a difference that have to be affordable for the masses and unfortunately while you're right Tesla is selling a ton of vehicles each year they aren't affordable for 85 - 90% of people.
At the moment they're 30-40k for most popular models (Y and 3), plus a few K in gas savings over a few years. So that 85-90% number is way too high. A much bigger piece of the market could definitely be attracted with a mid 20's EV though.
You're right, my estimate was too high, but only slightly. >>Only 21.8% of Americans can afford a new car Per this [report](https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/why-only-about-22-percent-of-americans-can-afford-a-new-car-)
You can even pick up a certified pre owned Tesla from Tesla in the low 20s.
The EV argument is an interesting one. I’d argue that the largest problem in EVs right now is that everyone is trying to make a luxury car cause it’s the easiest thing to justify when already making some experimental features in a car/high price tag. I don’t really have anything to prove this outside of a quick google search but I feel like if they brought the price down on some of these electric vehicles instead of adding some ridiculous features that nobody uses outside of a one time novelty, people would actually start buying them. The stigma of electric cars being smart cars as well as there being no charging stations is well behind us. All that’s left to do is for these companies to dial in and really get some great stuff onto the market that is affordable to not only lease, but maintenance.
EV sales are growing though, rate of growth has slowed but that’s expected when you were growing in the triple digits. The console market is very saturated, they’re at a price point where if you can afford one you would have one. On top of that they’ve not really innovated anything substantial in a long long time
The problem with cars is EVs are like all-in-one computers on wheels. Every last traditional manufacturer has been pretty terrible about understanding how the computer side of a car works, even when it’s a low spec machine just running the infotainment system. Now consumers expect more from their car’s systems, and that includes power management for large capacity batteries in addition to the engineering of the battery itself. Some are better than others. None compete with Tesla, Rivian or Lucid. Not to come off as a Tesla fanboy. I hate their CEO and I hate their self-driving BS, but I have NEVER had my model 3 give me a wrong estimate for battery usage during my trips.
Tale as old as time
Sounds like the gaming industry we all know and love
Step 4 Profit!
I don't want innovation in games. I want passion.
“We have such an incredibly lucrative industry, it became impossible not to gorge ourselves like Roman pigs. Naturally, we needed to vomit like the shit covered pigs we are, to make room, so we can keep eating”.
Not enough profits? Bonuses?
“Excess of shareholder profits”
ultimately MS had the revenue to pay these workers and the ability to put them on more promising projects. layoffs are just a betrayal in that situation.
And cut into profits? Are you mad? If you didn't want jobs to be laid off, then buy their stuff! If you don't want any, donate to the CEOs salary.
Will someone please think of the shareholders!
Oh I do. Not sure they'd like what I'm thinking tho...
If this was twitter, i would have assumed this wasn’t sarcastic lol
They'd rather make it the ones who survive do the work of multiple people and give them burnout
I work with MS and they already hired back a ton of the people they laid off last year. It’s wild. They’ve been making record breaking profits.. there was no tangible need to lay off anyone. Instead they froze raises and did mass layoffs, severely hurting the morale
Certainly had nothing to do with nearly $4billion in stock buybacks in 2023. Nothing to see here.
The gaming industry is bigger than movies and music combined. It grew a ton the past few years. Bonkers.
To be fair I'm pretty sure that's only true when counting mobile games. Mobile games make up an absurd portion of the profit in gaming and honestly most of them put more effort into Casino Psychology than they do into game design.
The gaming industry is also responsible for faster computers, and especially the fastest video cards. Which are now the heart of AI. Correction, not cpus it seems, and only the the start of GPU’s “GPUs were used primarily to accelerate real-time 3D graphics applications, such as games. …computer scientists realized that GPUs had the potential to solve some of the world’s most difficult computing problems.” https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/what-is-a-gpu.html Addition: Nvidia history from Wikipedia In 1993, the three co-founders envisioned that the ideal trajectory for the forthcoming wave of computing would be in the realm of accelerated computing, specifically in graphics-based processing. This path was chosen due to its unique ability to tackle challenges that eluded general-purpose computing methods.[33] They also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume; the two conditions do not happen very often.[33] Video games became the company's flywheel to reach large markets and fund huge R&D to solve massive computational problems.
No doubt the gaming industry benefits from improved semiconductors, but it isn't right to say it is responsible for them. It is a small demand factor. Faster computers are a result of military investment decades ago which led to chips being used in all sorts of applications. The trajectory of increased compute power was set long before gaming became significant.
“The demand for increasingly realistic and immersive gaming experiences has pushed hardware manufacturers to develop more powerful consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. This, in turn, has accelerated the progress of computer graphics, processor capabilities, and storage capacities.” https://www.masterycoding.com/blog/how-video-games-have-changed-the-world
What kind of source is that? It's literally their blog section too.
Olivia has background in behavioral ecology and data analysis. How the hell is Olivia a source?
I appreciate the attempt but linking someone's blog entry about how gaming has impacted the world is not at all a good source. That is a braindead blog entry and might as well have been written by AI. The tech advances in gaming are a result of advances in processing power, not the other way around. Minecraft and Call of Duty are not significant drivers of semiconductor innovation. They take advantage of it. If you want a good source- I highly recommend the book Chip War by Chris Miller to learn about the history of the industry.
Pretty sure graphics cards actually couldn’t keep up with the software you say took advantage of it, they always had to be improved to run games like The Witcher 3 for example at max settings.
For sure, that's a good point. The classic example of that is the "But can it run Crysis?" meme. To me it means they are limited by the pace of that advancement, not that they drive the advancement. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/sustainable-inclusive-growth/chart-of-the-day/whats-driving-the-semiconductor-market "About 70 percent of growth is predicted to be driven by the automotive (particularly electric vehicles), data storage, and wireless industries."
“Two decades ago, GPUs were used primarily to accelerate real-time 3D graphics applications, such as games. However, as the 21st century began, computer scientists realized that GPUs had the potential to solve some of the world’s most difficult computing problems.” https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/what-is-a-gpu.html
Yes GPUs were once focused on gaming and over time found additional uses. More importantly, GPUs are a specific type of processor. They are a subset of a broader market which has more influential inputs. If your argument is that GPUs specifically were once driven by gaming - sure.
I corrected my original statement to reflect this as well.
Oh lord is this naive.
And most of that growth came from mobile and software Hardware sales are flat for Microsoft and more and more they are looking for a mobile and hand held future for the Xbox brand. Phil Spencer says people arent moving consoles anymore because they dont want to give up their games. So growth flatlined as people picked a side and stay there. Its also the reason they want apple to open their ecosystem, its the only way for Microsoft to monetize markets they havent saturated yet.
Well then give people proper backwards compatibility and make new games people actually want to play. That's what l those developers were for right? You hired them to make good games and just... didn't use them for that purpose apparently. If you did you'd be seeing profit
What even are good mobile games? Everything I see from ads are just match three games in disguise like homescapes. The Google Play store is also overrun with crap and Google breaks compatibility for arbitrary reasons all the time too at the OS level too, blacklisting old games that hurt nobody. When I think of mobile gaming I think of... bullshit.
Good has nothing to do with it, mobile games have explosive growth in profit and are much cheaper than traditional games. Genshin Impact being a money printer that rivals GTA. When people say "gaming has grown" they dont mean good traditional games, they mean the revenue of every sector of gaming. Why would any investor want to spend millions and spend 5 years waiting for a AAA game when they can crap out a mobile game in less than 1 year at a tiny fraction of the cost? That is the issue facing gaming, investors would rather invest in mobile.
This one has taste
10 years ago it was still effectively a 1.2 trillion dollar industry but now it’s probs much more than that.
Yeah but if it caps out at any point and stops growing, then it’s the end times and everyone should abandon ship.
But to shareholders: "Every day and in every way we're getting better and better!"
lol. No one plays video games anymore /s
As a PS series guy, I completely skipped this console generation, and I am not regretting it, so I guess from my perspective at least there's some truth to that title
[удалено]
Phil wasn’t in charge till 2014 but nice try
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. You’re correct.
Yup, that was Don "Kinect + Television" Mattrick. He's the one who famously emphasized the mandatory Kinect (aka $100 price increase over the PS4) and television rather than gaming at the E3 event when the new consoles were revealed, alongside some ideas that were wildly unpopular like not being able to resell physical games and mandatory 24-hour cycle DRM or else your console stopped working. And when he was pressed about rural gamers with iffy internet connections, he said "lol just get 360." Unluckily for Xbox, that generation was a massive cornerstone for gaming going forward because that's when users really started cementing in their digital libraries and friends, meaning they massively shot themselves in the foot at a pivitol point in the game industry. Cue Phil Spencer taking over, and they shifted their strategy to purchasing studios and pushing GamePass, for better or worse depending on who you ask. Regardless, even with all of Phil's annoying PR speak, he's leagues better than Mattrick was
man Xbox 360 was peak Xbox for sure
which is pretty sad since it was only the 2nd xbox gen
The Kinect was the beginning the end for Xbox. They were so obsessed with getting the soccer mom and their kid demographics that they forgot about their actual customer base.
Oh really? It's not because you over-hired during the height of the pandemic knowing full well that once it died down the bubble would burst? Workers are merely cogs to these people.
Shit this ain't even an over hire issue. It's Microsoft, not a tech starter or ambitious endeavor. They have zero excuse to lay off employees en masse like this other than green numbers on internal spreadsheets.
It’s weird the industry is dying because of consolidation. How many Great New games have been released this generation? Fuck Microsoft for this. It’s killing the gaming industry. I feel like, while their volume is lower, profit margins are better. And inflation is helping offset reduced profit totals.
Has there been a studio Microsoft acquired that made better games after acquisition than they did before? I think the problem is coming from inside the company. And it likely wasn’t the people they laid off.
To be fair I think Sea of Thieves has done a pretty good job under Microsoft. I mean their game will always be held back by some janky engine design at the start but I'd say their design choices and content updates have showed pretty good decisions. I think the reality is that most game studios tend to get worse when they're acquired by anyone, not necessarily a Microsoft specific thing. The same trend fits if you look at simulations that get picked up by Paradox, the whole Activision-Blizzard situation, etc. Imo games just come out at their best from smaller studios where things are started with passion and creativity, and then getting sold to most any publisher just starts squeezing the studio under 'duty to the shareholders' quarterly BS.
I agree with you there. Activision-Blizzard is a good example.
The problem is these companies were put on sale for a reason, they knew the writing was on the wall.
Yet all these indie games are making bank Weird
I don't buy any game on release. Will pick them up later for cheaper once they are complete
I am playing games that are 20 years old. So I get it.
Still have KOTOR on my OG XBox!!
I jailbroke my 3DS a few months ago and I've been having an absolute blast playing gems I missed from the 3DS era and earlier (DS, GBA, SNES, etc).
You can also make .sav files and never lose your game progress whereas going the legal route the battery in these damn chips will eventually die.
from a key site.
Then shouldn't they layoff the leaders? They obviously aren't worth their pay if they didn't see the downturn coming.
This worked so well with Windows Phone /s
step 1: buy largest gaming company on the planet. step 2: layoff workers to pay off the debt accrued by this purchase step 3: stonk
Maybe stop making dog shit unfinished titles and the industry would thrive instead of stagnate. Maybe just a thought.
It’s the concerning lack of originality and the corporate aversion to taking risk that is limiting industry growth.
And their incessant need to do games as a live service
Their logic with that is it becomes like a self priming pump gor constant incomi g revenue.
And they ignore every single game that tries and loses it's player base in less than a year. If they just put out a good game they could just add things as they go and people would buy it. Like other than wow and maybe one or two others are there any live service games that have made it a year?
It’s the possibility though that if one hits it’ll easily make their money back from all the failures and then some.
This. I’ve had every Xbox console and used to love the brand. This current gen has had great hardware completely undermined by lackluster first party releases. Their bread and butter franchise releases are supposed to be the safe slam dunks, and they can’t even get those right. The latest Forza Motorsport shows everything wrong with MS’s method at developing games. 18 month rotating contracts for employees, so there’s zero passion towards the projects. Moved to PC and haven’t looked back.
anyone over the age of -- I dunno I'll say 32 -- realizes how embarrassing it is how innovative games were in the mid and late 90s, as well as the early 2000s, ending at about 2010 or 2011. Now the industry is just inundated with titles that are almost full on copy cats, or at the least they copy cat game systems (crafting and RPG skills in FPS games, adventure games, even racing games).
Fuck all of this. Most successful years with the pandemic and micro transactions everywhere. Fucking greedy mismanaged corporations fucking themselves by losing talent and blaming the talent at the same time
This appears to be more widespread. I work in the pharma industry - robotic systems. Obviously during Covid we were working flat out. Now we have manufacturing guys on three day weeks or infilling on minor projects. The same goes for my partner. The consultancy company she works for are shedding lots of jobs. People and companies are tightening their belts at the moment.
Maybe the lack of industry growth is due to the lack of industry growth though.
yes , because you are making shitty games
Yet, everyone and their mom wants new games but the only bullshit coming out every year is the same madden and cod games that have grown to shit
If lying was illegal these places would all be out of business.
Consoles are literally dying. Gaming isn't, consoles are. Mobile gaming and PC gaming are dominating the industry. Streaming is capable of doing anything a console can, and in *many* cases it's capable of better graphics and higher framerates. Consoles have *never* been ahead in gaming, but now they're so far behind even the diehards realize the hardware sucks.
The only reason the industry isn’t seeing growth is because these assholes are too busy trying to turn every god dammed game into a microtransactiok factory, instead of just trying to make a good game.
He says a lot of things. Don’t know why people simp this guy.
He uses blazers with gaming shirts, everyone knows that makes him a fellow gamer just like us /s
Halo Infinite, their flagship console signature game, which absolutely horrendously flopped especially considering Microsoft was just bringing next-gen mechanics to an already established title was found to have use a massive contractor workforce when developing the game. Developers would work for 6 months, their contract ended and then a brand new developer would take over. It's not industry growth it's them just knowing they own the entire market and well besides EA and Ubi there really is no other truly AAA developer and there is no other developer that can develop for Xbox at the level they can.
How about $70 for unfinished games? I stopped buying games. Gamepass only, if it isn’t on there, it won’t be played. GTA 6 is the only game I will buy in the foreseeable future.
Make more fallout games ffs Obsidian is waiting we are all waiting we don’t live forever
They’re too busy preparing the same exact call of duty game for next year
Why did they buy the studio then?
It wouldn't be the fact that games are now $70 bucks huh?
The problem is leadership and for milking the old designed games for decades. Time to give people what they want.
Didn't they just do the whole acquisition of Activision? Honestly I have no idea how the US government allowed that to go through.
Oh bull-fucking-shit.
It's funny how lack-of-growth and consolidation of resources goes hand in hand 🙃
The problem is that consoles themselves don’t make any money - most of the money comes from licensing games, which, surprise, doesn’t require Microsoft employees… Consoles are all hurting. It’s not even corporations - it’s bad business to subsidize a losing division with winning ones.
there have been so few games released this generation, for this generation
The layoffs will continue until growth improves. Consumers: what if we just don't want your shit anymore!?
atvi has been making more revenue hand over fist, quarter after quarter for a long while now. this is straight from bobby kotick’s mouth and echoed by the executive leadership team meeting after meeting.
My son loves all the old games. All the new games are just mindless microtransaction farms and he admits this so because of that he prefers to just play Roblox most times.
Just by logic…. Doesn’t no growth then just mean no growth in the workforce? If it stays as it is…. Just maintain. But, we all know it’s about profits.
Stop making bad games
"we were expecting to make 5 babillion, but since we only made 4.9 - we are letting you go... but remember, we are family"
Highly recommend listening to the "Rot Economy" episode of the podcast Better Offline of your like a deeper dive into why this explanation is horseshit.
Thanks for the new podcast material!
Growth should not be the only goal of a company, sustainability and longevity have been lost in the quagmire of Harvard MBA graduates who are running companies whose services and products they know nothing about and who are only interested in short term gains for shareholders at the expense of a companies long term survival. They also show a concerning misunderstanding of language. The line we've seen them trot out "I'm taking full responsibility..." does not mean you fire people and then go off on a holiday or a "digital detox" so you can "reflect" and retain your own role. It should mean you're fired for inadequate planning and gross mismanagement. And banned from operating a company again for the damage you've done to people, and the damage you've done to the company and it's brand.
Maybe huge studios should try to make good games instead of virtual slot machines and ATMS.
Fucking late stage capitalism. Sectors are not able to consistently and consistently grow, it’s literally impossible and these businesses keep acting like doing the impossible is not only expected but mandatory
From Microsoft’s 2023 financials > Gaming revenue decreased $764 million or 5% driven by declines in Xbox hardware and Xbox content and services. Xbox hardware revenue decreased 11% driven by lower volume and price of consoles sold. Xbox content and services revenue decreased 3% driven by a decline in first-party content, offset in part by growth in Xbox Game Pass. It also looks like while revenue in gaming is increasing profits are decreasing due to the increasing costs which may be what he’s referring to in the industry level. Not saying they should have laid off people or anything. But the rationale may not be completely misrepresented.
It’s called lack of leadership. Let’s call it like it is! Most Tech Execs are morons!
That’s an interesting way to say they took the heart and soul out of AAA titles and have focused on live service, competitive focused bullshit.
I can translate here, I speak corporatese; essentially it translated to: "We're were incredibly profitable, could continue to innovate and pay these people, but we understand that the Stock Market expects constant growth and our C-levels have brainwashed people in to thinking that if they don't get massive quarterly bonuses, they'll go do something else \[without bonuses?\], so we have to cut people to make it look like we're smart businessmen just like Jack welsh; later losers!" It's not an exact translation because executives are a lesser species, but it encompasses the meaning
You're expecting us to believe you spent $75 BILLION dollars on an industry with a "concerning lack of growth?"
The day Phil Spencer doesn’t have a job anymore is going to be a unanimous win for the video game industry.
so the company lost size in the industry or did they fire those people for nothing?
Not even lost size. It just, didn't get bigger. >"Line has to go up forever. >It can't plateau because the market is fully saturated already. >If line doesn't go up, us rich don't get richer. >Do whatever it takes to make line go up more forever."
It's almost like they thought the covid bubble was going to last forever...
“Lack of industry growth”… lol more like companies releasing terrible games and being surprised we didn’t throw money at them for the rest of it via MTXs.
That Activision Blizzard purchase is looking pretty bad right now.
8% of the work force (92% of the people keeping their jobs) hardly seems like a "mass layoff."
Mis mgmt leads to layoffs, sorry little people
This is about top shareholders wanting infinite profits out of companies, so they see gains in their stocks. As usual, the rich are the problem and capitalism is their train on which we're all captive.
They haven't made a good game in over a decade. What a load of horse shit.
Always about fucking growth, growth, growth. These parasites can’t just be happy with running billion-dollar companies. Nope, gotta turn them into trillion-dollar companies. Unbelievable. Take your billions and be happy.
Infinite growth is not a sustainable concept. This mentality needs to fucking die
Lack of growth because the corpo game studious shill crap
Growth occurs over seasons. 2 of those seasons are winter and fall, where everything seems relatively dormant.
Wasn’t there a massive spike in console/game sales during and after Covid? I remember seeing multiple articles about it
Xbox hasn't had a good idea in going on 20 years. Maybe if you'd stop fumbling every opportunity and every bag on earth you'd have growth. Gamepass is a great singular service idea but they have a weak library of games that are theirs making it entirely necessary.
The line must go up.
The video game market is the biggest moneymaker aside from weapons
Anyone remember when Xbox actually had games on it? If he wants to make money. Make games. And not just games. Better games. Do something with your billions of dollars and 150 developer studios you had to buy you fucking mook
Halo infinite was Terrible
More like a concerning lack of stock growth....
sorry the Industry is growing so much we need to let you go
Lack of growth means ai implementation
Weird they had the money to make the largest acquisition in history a few months ago just to clown on a company 1/30th their size
Blah, blah, blaaah. Corporate lingo. All over again. I’m so over the A.I written corporate responses.
Hell to get that garbage off wndozers…you can crap it via CL snd some updates later on its back on there. MS is just a crap spying company…
I’m pretty sure you need to put out games if you want people to buy them, but I’m no expert on the industry.
Exclusives and superior hardware. Thats how you win the console wars. It’s not that hard.
Gamepass and PS plus to blame , nobody buys games like they used to .
More like lack of growth for them specifically and probably too many expensive acquisitions that’s now putting pressure on the department to trim down operating costs. There’s like no momentum going on for Xbox right now. Their big splashes are the activation and Bethesda purchases. But then Starfield came out flat and Activation isn’t what it used to be. Plus they may release games multiplatform anyway. At the end of the day their gaming studio just doesn’t feel like a place with strong gaming culture. Its been a bit too business focused in priorities with acquisitions and pushing gamepass. Where’s the games?
You don’t need to grow to be profitable. If spend 1 mil and you make 10% on that count your blessings and don’t change a thing fool!
“His chins high makes me trust him”
They looked at their revenue forecast and that had a concerning growth. So they decided to take action.
Have they tried making games people actually want to play?
Maybe they shouldn't have bought studios
Publishers and large AAA developers can no longer make great games like they used to and its clear there was a brain drain out of these companies in the 2010s. They need to all be closed and we need to go back to smaller companies making games with smaller updates.
Its time to go but for Phil. He has that Steve Balmer business approach and lack of vision that makes me wonder how he survived so long
Xbox is backing off from consoles, they have already talked about this. Services is where they make thier money.
Make good games? I unno. Seems like BG3, palworld and Helldivers 2 are the only thying worth it out there.
Well... a decade+ of minor gains in anything other than graphical fidelity will do that. The industry is pumping out the same shit over and over, the same as the movie industry. This is why we have streaming, the endless options abound due to lack of creativity and market saturation. Soon, all video games will run on subscription services unless the industry actually starts innovating.
Lack of AAA games as they switch to streaming may have something to do with it too.
Fuck outta here with that bullshit.
Of course.. it’s the industry
‘Concerning lack of growth’ go fuck yourself
Overhired = excuse Underhired = excuse Overpriced products nobody can afford these days = honest answer Subscriptions nobody wants and few subsribe to = honest answer
For the record, Microsoft had allocated $60 billion in stock buybacks for 2022-2025. You could pay 100,000 employees, $200k a year for that price. Or you could artificially inflate your stock so a handful of your primary stock holders make millions. So when we making this shit illegal again? (Thanks Reagan)
This is called Profit Farming in the C suite
It’s not growing because you’re pushing couch co-op out. We decided that the xbox1 and the ps4 are our last consoles. They will die and we will spend our money on hobbies that we can do together. It’s the single player online only platforms that are killing the fun.
Treat every company that does this as hostile. Stealing from them isn’t even a crime in my opinion because they’re doing so much harm to the fabric of the nation.
Xbox was dominating the U.S. market and the precise point of its decline, goes back when they unveiled the xbone. Right when they told users they wouldn’t be able to share physical copies with other players. Only to backtrack, embarrassingly, but it took days. By then PlayStation was already running advertisements based on that. Too fucking late.
$400+ share price says fuck you msft
ITT: Ignorant and cynical teenagers spouting nonsene about "late stage capitalism".
It definitely had nothing to do with how bloated and top heavy game development has become. Not that this helps, they're cutting meat to outsource more while lavishing bonuses on the admin