Yeah on the production side of things,
T
T_T
's post here is a pretty good example of how MS have things set up. MS has some wiggle room to adjust the wafers, but I'm pretty sure there's lead time involved in orders of wafer adjustments, especially since MS have to do it through AMD (they don't go through TSMC directly).
So there is some control they can have over Series S & X production rates, but I don't think Series X demand is large enough to really necessitate a significant increase in production amounts. So at least for some time they would be stuck with (at the very least) Series S wafers just sitting there, wafers they paid for but aren't doing anything with, just to avoid flooding the market with more of those systems. And those are costs MS have to eat one way or the other anyway.
Would rather see them spin those S chips into what Project Keystone was shaping up into, and/or into some new Surface product line. At least they would get use out of the wafer and with products that could be either cheaper to make or not bleed money on hardware (or maybe even both) the way the Series S is.
Was it really his strategy though? Because for as much crap people give Don Mattrick, his strategy was also about games and he actually secured several notable exclusives for XBO for the launch and first few years of its life. He did push Kinect though and that kind of screwed up the 360 near its end; I think the TV stuff was mainly other parts of MS shoving the push onto Mattrick so he didn't have too much a choice.
Phil Spencer's trying to do Mattrick's job on the game front but he hasn't been measuring up. And he's a far cry from Peter Moore era Xbox. Neither Peter or Don allowed marquee IP like Halo to degrade as badly as it has under Phil's watch. They didn't let Xbox have desert years like 2022. They didn't even let potentially disastrous optics keep repeating regularly (RROD got handled in definitive terms relatively quickly; XBO DRM stuff was walked back even before launch or just a couple months after, then Don Mattrick left altogether).
So Phil Spencer can't even deliver as well as Don Mattrick despite messaging "all about games", and he's got way more to work with resources-wise than Mattrick or even Moore ever had.
Even sillier is Aaron Greenberg somehow getting a promotion. He should hire the guy who runs VGChartz to handle Twitter social media sales news. He gave him the green light with that quote-tweet last year after all.
(regardless is you defending or attacking him, it is in healthy to spend so much time thinking about some mega Corp exec).
