Rob

Gave away a huge exclusive in Starfield for only less than 400k sales on Playstation. It wasn't worth the port at all! For a while it was king of Gamepass! Putting it on Playstation was such a mistake and a waste of resources.

Here is Groks response when it's highest thinking level is used:

Total playing on Xbox console and Xbox PC as of today:

It was number one seller on Xbox for two weeks straight. And it's a success on Gamepass. More players everyday.

Jay, it's doing good on Gamepass. The numbers keep going up.

XBOX really is the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast!

It's already at 3m on Xbox and playtracker has a lag.

I dont think that's true about Gears of War not having the commercial that it used to. Xbox is up to 2.7 million now and it keeps going up and gaining in popularity.

Hey Aaron, this is awesome! When we met, you said you were going to add me. I'm still waiting brother.

I see we agree on some points, but your first and second points are the areas I would push back against. The pivot was for several reasons and it wasn't just growth in general, it was the 30% mandate, wanting all the heavy hitters day one on Gamepass, gamepass not growing fast enough to be sustainable, inefficient development of AAA games, and poor reception of the costly exclusives they did release. What they missed was that they took their user base for granted. The faithful gamers that stuck it out with XBOX started to leave when exclusivity was being abandoned. People aren't stupid, if they can get all of the games on Playstation, there is no reason to have an XBOX. As a result, I think around 18 million people chose to go with Playstation or Steam rather than upgrade to one of the series consoles. Their total store base shrunk to around 42 million from 60 million. Instead just growth, the return of exclusives also mean to return to the status quo and get those users back. Once that is reestablished, we can talk about real growth again. They also realized that console users were the primary base for gamepass, so without people on console, gamepass simply would not grow. As for your second point, there is plenty of public data about console sales and numerous statements by Microsoft that the Series consoles were in line with Xbox One sales and initially their issue was with keeping up with demand. It wasn't until four games was mentioned, literally that quarter, that sales began dropping heavily. Yes, some element of this was just due to that time in the consoles cycle, and the market in general, but many quarters saw Playstation and Nintendo up in the green, while XBOX was consistently in the red. As they released more exclusives, it just got worse. In addition to the above, they had a very poor release cadence of games, despite acquiring all of those studios. For a years, they were letting some studios get carried by others. Games were taking way too long, for too little in return for the wait (Hellblade 2 anyone?). This was clearly not sustainable. In the 360 days we got the Gears trilogy, the Series consoles get one single Gears game! So I would say every first party game should be exclusive moving forward. Exclusives were never the problem, it was terrible management, games taking too long to make and costing too much as a result. Better management and grater efficiency is the only way forward, because they need their platform to thrive, and that's just not possible without exclusives. It also can't be ignored that after the announcement that exclusives were returning, sales started to pick up again. The chart below isn't upto date, but gets the message across.

It's unusual for Alinea to overestimate.

This is from her memo today. Read the first point.

"So don't say anything about this, but the time skip was so big since Skyrim that we named it Starfield. People don't even realize this, but they will when share the location of planet Nirn. So really, we are working on Elder Scrolls VII"

Gamepass wasn't the issue here. See the images, gamepass players were less than half of steams buyers from other Doom entries. For some reason, people were just not as interested right now.

The article is bunk. Which employees were they actually talking about? Surely not he OGs!

It's not everyone's favorite, but it is many people's favorite. Fallout 4 is is five years newer, and so certainly looks less dated and the console and PC space had grown. Fallout 3 compared to Fallout New Vegas is a better comparison. Only 2 years apart and the same generation.