The all-digital future

 Are friends electric?

By now we've all gotten very used to hearing about leaks from the Microsoft studios play book. Heck, these days it's more likely to hear something that Microsoft doesn't want us to know than it is to get an actual official announcement. But I guess that's just the price of business when you spend a year and a bit in a courtroom, now isn't it? (Disclosure is the worst-friend to secret lovers everywhere.) Of course, the best part about these leaks is that we're getting plenty of embarrassing looks at one of the biggest game companies around revealing once more, for those that don't know, so called 'field experts' are just as much bumbling morons as the rest of us are. If you want to dissolve the justification behind the expensive paychecks that this industry affords it's executives, just take a look at their grasp of the industry and know well that a semi-literate garden rabbit could do just as good of a job.

Heck, Microsoft were dumb enough to take a look at the, then upcoming, Baldur's Gate 3 and write off it's potential entirely, labelling it a 'second wave Stadia RPG', which for the life of me I can't get anyone to explain to me- Baldur's Gate 3 was being ported to Stadia, not developed there! Now I know there's not a soul on earth that expected Baldur's Gate 3 to do the gangbusters that it did, but even a child could have seen the pedigree of the company, the brand name, the positive feedback from the very public betas, and assume that there would at least be a strong niche crowd around the CRPG comeback for one of gaming's most legendary titles! You don't have to be an expert to put your noggin' to work. And it seems that in underestimating Baldur's Gate, Microsoft completely undervalued it's worth, and gave no effort to working with Larian to port the game to Xbox until after it released everywhere else and scored 'Game of the Year contender' review scores. Good job Microsoft, you're behind the ball again.

But that wasn't all. We also heard about some more of Microsoft's extended plans to establish a monopoly across the industry back when the higher ups were still floating that proposal around. Back when this was first brought up we just knew that Xbox was eyeing up the possibility of spending Sony out of the industry, but now we've actually got some of the targets that they were eyeing up. So who was in the crosshairs? Nintendo! Wait, what? That's right, Microsoft entertained the idea of going after literal gaming royalty in order to force some extra recognition under their umbrella which... honestly that doesn't even sound real. Surely Nintendo would never dream of letting that happen! But it gets even crazier... Microsoft were even eyeing up Valve.

I cannot overstate how utterly insane that is. Valve has been the front page of gaming for decades now through Steam, they don't even class as a development studio anymore for how rarely their teams ever cobble together any real software outside of that site, and Gabe Newell seems almost diametrically opposed to the idea of Microsoft ownership. You see, Gabe isn't just some opportunistic suit, he's an actual believer in the video game industry and his dedication to player ownership of their games is part of the reason why Steam is one of the most trusted game distribution platforms out there, even despite it's woes. Xbox talk a big talk, but they're in the middle of shutting the 360 store front down in a few months. There's no substance to them in the preservation of the games industry and Valve absolutely would have no part in their machinations. To even entertain otherwise is to lie to oneself.

However the most concerning of the revelations may have pertained to the supposed mid-generational console that Microsoft intend to make. Of course, public facing Microsoft will wax lyrical about how the Series X is their mid generation improvement, despite the fact that the Series S struggles to exist with it's current gen counterparts, but in secret the team were planning something dastardly. Apparently the next console release from Microsoft was decided to be a Series X style console without any disc drive functionality whatsoever, the first step in their march towards an "Adorably all digital" future which sounds like a game preservationists worst nightmare. No more discs, destroyed secondary market (not that the secondary market is doing so hot right now anyway, but they certainly don't need another nail.) And a useless paper weight once the servers for the thing close in 10 years time. Pretty much the anti-consumer console theorised by the company so behind in the console race that they have to call themselves the pro-consumer competitors.

This has rightly sparked worry about the direction of Microsoft if they even so much as entertained this proposition, what can be said about their remarks towards the importance of software preservation for future generations? The gaming market is already full of jackals trying to take advantage of the common man, we don't need more lining up for our succulents! We've already had a week of the Nvidia CEO pathetically trying to gaslight everyone into thinking they need an overpriced underpowered 40 series card because 'AI frames are better than native frames'. (Yeah, I'm sure competitive first person shooter lovers weren't just screaming obscenities at their screens when they read that!) To know that even Microsoft no longer has our backs... I know that Phil Spencer has run out and assured that all this is old data supporting old ways of thinking- but these ideas made it to the planning stages, I wouldn't call that the product of 'harmless speculative brainstorming'; I'd call that a seriously considered business plan!

And then we have the apparent news that at least for one point in history, Xbox put up a rather hefty ultimatum for their exit from the game industry. It was revealed that at one point Microsoft declared that if Game Pass subscribers don't triple by 2027, then Xbox would bid it's farewell from the gaming market and leave the field open for Sony- which is a wild proposition! First off, Game Pass is already pretty well adopted with around 25 million subscribers, and the program is well out of it's honey moon phase so growth like that would only be possible through a sudden mass adoption of Xbox consoles. Secondly, if Xbox left the gaming scene then all of us would be prey to Sony's worst anti-consumer practises which so far are only held back because they have serious competition hungry to pick up the slack. Nintendo don't even rate in the same generation. Thirdly, can we be sure that this ultimatum isn't still the case, only secretly? After the all-digital box, I don't believe anything that Xbox tells us.

All and all the leaks have revealed nothing but bad and embarrassing news for Xbox with the exception of some proposed Bethesda remasters, which is kinda interesting in a vacuum. This is like getting the first crappy draft of your manuscript shared around the office, only that manuscript is the business plans for your multibillion dollar company and the office is the entire document consuming gamer world. I'll be honest, I think Xbox could be doing a lot better and after reading these snippets I'm starting to think that their decision makers might be the problem. Perhaps if we did away with the people that have no idea what a game even is we'd have some more appropriate ideas and proposals heading our way which don't threaten to destabilise the entire industry and leave consumers utterly at the mercy of a screw-up-prone organisation. You know, if we're lucky.