After laying off almost 2,000 people, Xbox finds itself in a position at odds with the community-first image it has cultivated for itself.

After laying off almost 2,000 people, Xbox finds itself in a position at odds with the community-first image it has cultivated for itself.

  • I Cast FistEnglish
    12•10 months ago

    the tone around the (Microsoft-Actiblizzard) merger was largely dominated by vocally supportive Xbox players and commentators

    Excuse me, what? I guess my social bubble is thick as fuck, because I didn’t see a single person supporting that megacorp scale merger.

    These two concurrent pushes (of marketing good vibes image) resulted in a landscape that was, at best, reluctant to discuss the potential harm of its acquisitions and, at worst, actively rejected it because Xbox’s “good guy” image and messaging had so thoroughly seeped into the foundations of shared community spaces and broader gaming consciousness

    Feels like a load of bullshit, then again I don’t even know where the cool kids hang out, so it could be me.

    The superficial artifice of Xbox’s brand permeates every corner of video game marketing. It’s an endless parade of phrases that don’t quite mean anything and campaigns designed to romanticise and humanise the company’s seemingly bottomless appetite for growth at all costs.

    I guess this is why I didn’t buy into the previous paragraphs, I just assumed people were “too smart” to fall for so much corporate bullshit.

    Microsoft closed the day with a $3 trillion valuation for the first time in the company’s history.

    3 trillion with roughly 20k employees now. I wonder how much of that value is assigned to its workforce, like “of the 3 trillion our company’s worth, our workers are worth 100 billion” or something.

    • @TORFdot0English
      14•10 months ago

      The support I saw around the merger was from blizzard fans who were excited that maybe Microsoft would mismanage blizzard slightly less than Activision did

      • MentalEdgeEnglish
        8•10 months ago

        Basically this.

        I don’t like mergers but holy fuck Activision/Blizzard had to go. That that POS Kotick got away with a golden parachute while pulling every dirty trick that unluckier cronies have pulled once and gotten cancelled, is a travesty.

        Getting acquired is just about the only way something that big “dies”. Activision swore many times they’d change, but it was never gonna happen. Too many wore rose tinted glasses and forgave them because of what Blizzard once was, dismissing what it had become.

        Microsoft has been good to its subsidiary studios in recent years, but eventually it too will have to be dealt with in some form. My preferred method would be hitting it with the “monopoly-break-up-stick” again.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•10 months ago

          Exactly, it’s not so much cheering for how great it will be, moreso that it can’t really get any worse, and while xbox and Microsoft aren’t great, Actiblizzard completely destroyed themselves from a public perception.

    • @NOT_RICKEnglish
      5•10 months ago

      20k is just the gaming division. From what I can tell by looking online they have over 200k employees

    • MattEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      There was definitely a lot of support for this merger - people see it as ABK’s “redemption arc”, and there was a lot of excitement around ABK games coming to GamePass / other platforms like Steam because of this.

      Ultimately this is how people think: What is in the merger for them? And they don’t think macro, but just simple things like “now I can finally get this game on [platform]”