A Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign that looks like Impossible mission through a documentary by Adam Curtis, A transmission of the war prehistory which shows fans E-Day and the birth of the iconic “Lancer” chainsaw, and a trailer that showed Perfect darkness is not only still aliveit is potentially thriving. Microsoft’s Summer Showcase 2024 was the best look Xbox has had since the Xbox One years. But it comes at a high price, and the company doesn’t seem willing to admit it publicly.
Insiders had been touting the presentation for days, in part because the full list of reveals and announcements had already leaked to some media outlets and beyond. Fans have burned their fingers before expecting Xbox to finally turn things around, only to be disappointed once again and realize that the platform is still in one of its inevitable “rebuild years.” The proof is always in the games themselves, and how successful they are can only really be determined when they get into gamers’ hands. So far, though, the presentation has delivered on its promise.
There were over sixty minutes of games big and small, offering everything from zombie survival to nostalgic teen hangouts, punctuated by huge first-party franchises and third-party teasers. If you own an Xbox Series X/S, there will be plenty to play this year and next. The eternal promise from Xbox game studio boss Matt Booty that Xbox games are worth releasing quarterly may finally be coming true. The only thing missing from the event was some accountability for what and who Microsoft sacrificed to get here.
It has been just over a month since the company announced Three studios will be closed and a fourth restructured. One of the victims, Tango Gameworks, and his hit of 2023 Hi-Fi noiseseemed to symbolize the best of Xbox in the Game Pass era: a hyper-stylized passion project from a newer team that wowed critics and won awards and wouldn’t have been possible without the “let a thousand flowers bloom” strategy behind the platform’s shift to a Netflix-like subscription library. In a devastating about-face, however, the cash-rich tech giant has laid off the team, along with renowned immersive sim makers Arkane Austin and others. According to internal comments from Booty and the head of parent company Zenimax, there simply wasn’t enough bandwidth for one of the world’s three most valuable companies to manage so many studios.
The bad news and the stupid explanation might not have been so well received if Microsoft had not announced mass layoffs in several departments just months before, including at the newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The cuts affected everyone, from the Overwatch2 Team to call of Duty Maker Sledgehammer Games, and included the hiring of Odysseya survival-crafting fantasy game that may have become Blizzard’s first new franchise in nearly a decade. Microsoft spent $69 billion on the acquisition, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer toured Activision Blizzard King’s offices shortly after the deal closed last fall, and then the mask dropped in early 2024.
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer made interviews with Game file And igamesnews. In other words: capitalism. But the complete closure of Tango Gameworks, originally founded by resident Evil Director Shinji Mikami, who is tasked with training a new generation of creatives, seemed particularly moody. The Xbox team made no mention of the laid-off developers and their contributions in its remarks to a live audience before the presentation today, nor during the recorded event itself. (Even after learning of his fate, Arkane Austin has worked hard postpone Red Case‘s much needed final update.)
Instead, Spencer opened the presentation by advertising BlackOps 6 and the company’s desire to make one of its most popular franchises accessible to even more players through the performance of a subscription for 17 USD per month. This may not have been surprising given the billions Microsoft paid to acquire the series, but the decision to open the show this way underscored the new reality of an Xbox brand that now has to generate a return worth all that investment. “I haven’t spoken about it publicly because now it’s time to focus on the team and the individual players,” Spencer told IGN later that dayaway from the hundreds of thousands of fans watching the presentation.
He continued:
It’s obviously a decision that’s very difficult for them, and I want to make sure through severance packages and other things that we’re doing the right thing for each team member. It’s not about my PR, it’s not about Xbox PR. It’s about these teams. Ultimately, as I’ve said time and time again, I need to run and grow a sustainable business within the company, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that, quite frankly, I don’t like, but decisions that somebody needs to make.
However, the showcase was not even the bar that Geoff Keighley set days before at the Game Awards presenter’s presentation. Xbox President Sarah Bond, the replied with Corpo Wortsalat when asked about studio closures last month, she ended the Xbox presentation by hinting at the future rather than dwelling on the recent past. “Our mission is to make Xbox the best place to play by including our own studios’ games in Game Pass at launch, by bringing your games into the future with our commitment to game retention, by pushing the boundaries of our future hardware and allowing you to play your games wherever you want, on Xbox console, PC and in the cloud,” she said. “That’s what defines Xbox today and in the future, and we’re working hard on the next generation.”
It was a commitment aimed at reassuring fans still recovering from the shock of the brand’s recent restructuring. But the future builds on the past, and every shiny new Xbox game now raises the question of what will happen to the teams Microsoft has bought or partnered with when it feels they no longer serve the bottom line.
Update 09.06.2024 21:10 ET: Comments from Spencer’s post-show interview added with IGN.
