Support NeoGAF

[Men_in_Boxes]

Sure he does!!

When was the last time they gave console sales numbers or even fucking sell-in numbers?

When was the last time they reported on boxed game sales of first party titles? They don't because they know they're shit, because they've conditioned the userbase to not pay for anything and wait for its release on GamePass (a service that vast swathes of the userbase bought decades of subs in advance for $1 per year).



Because I'm a gamer with eyes and ears and I can see clearly how they've shat the Xbox platform down the shitter. They literally have to launch all their FP games on their competitor's platform because otherwise they would not be able to earn enough on those projects to make a return on investment.

You don't need to be an expert to see gross incompetence. You just need to have common sense.

Heck, even insiders like SneakersSO here on Gaf has spilled the beans on much of the behind the scenes goings on at Xbox and how grossly incompetent Spencer is. So that represents second hand testimony of people who actually work at Xbox who are leaking that shit to folks like Sneakers.



Like MS own financials and third-party sales data.... you know... all the shit we discuss to death here on NeoGaf.

You literally have to be a raging fanboy loon to take the position that Xbox's leadership is not grossly incompetent at this point... don't die on that hill, fam. Even the most ardent Xbots on Twitter have long since abandoned that ship.

Do you know who the board of directors at Microsoft consists of? Why are you, and the "Xbots on Twitter" so much smarter than the board?

How did these absolute morons get into the position to be paid by Microsoft when you and the "Xbots on Twitter" are assessing performance so much more effectively than they are? I mean, you're not even getting paid for this and your work is way better than theirs.

This is a huge story. You should probably contact Connie Chung.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

WTH?!? Since when is Men_in_Boxes a Xbox fanboy?
If anything, the dude is a true believer in GAAS, but an Xbox fanboy? I never got that impression.

Look at this group of people...

Leadership - Source

news.microsoft.com

They're all successful, high IQ, hyper competitive, high functioning, ambitious people who value money / performance to a much higher degree than the average person. None of them care about Phil Spencers feelings.

Phil Spencer has been the head of Xbox for 11 years because this group of people are generally pleased with his performance.

Call me crazy, but I think it's exponentially harder to dupe these people than it is to dupe "Xbots on Twitter".

 

[Bernardougf]

Look at this group of people...

Leadership - Source

news.microsoft.com

They're all successful, high IQ, hyper competitive, high functioning, ambitious people who value money / performance to a much higher degree than the average person. None of them care about Phil Spencers feelings.

Phil Spencer has been the head of Xbox for 11 years because this group of people are generally pleased with his performance.

Call me crazy, but I think it's exponentially harder to dupe these people than it is to dupe "Xbots on Twitter".

Kathleen Kennedy drove in 10+ years the star wars brand to the ground and transformed the highest franchise ever to something that loses money constantly... and she still is very much at the same leading position and greenlighting projects doomed to fail ... so lets not pretend that sometimes very incompetent people are glued to top tier jobs for reasons we simply dont understand and never will...

I highly doubt her perfomance is "pleasing" in any way shape or form .. be it financially or culturally... its a factual and quantifiable disaster... but there she stands .. firmly...

 

[hemo memo]

He was a Microsoft advertising guy who basically did an internal hostile takeover coup of Bungie. Forcing out any senior creatives who were still there. If someone ever wanted to "fix" Bungie, getting rid of Parsons would be step 1.

Yeah but what's the alternative then?

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Kathleen Kennedy drove in 10+ years the star wars brand to the ground and transformed the highest franchise ever to something that loses money constantly... and she still is very much at the same leading position and greenlighting projects doomed to fail ... so lets not pretend that sometimes very incompetent people are glued to top tier jobs for reasons we simply dont understand and never will...

I highly doubt her perfomance is "pleasing" in any way shape or form .. be it financially or culturally... its a factual and quantifiable disaster... but there she stands .. firmly...

It's harder for me to say that about Kathleen Kennedy because I don't know what her job performance is based on. I know Star Wars (and Indiana Jones) haven't been doing well lately but what percentage of her job is based on that?

I pay more attention to Xbox financials and it does seem like Xbox (or MS Gaming) is in a far more dominant position today than they were 10 years ago. I know the people who still believe in the console wars may bristle at the thought.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

it does seem like Xbox (or MS Gaming) is in a far more dominant position today than they were 10 years ago.

Wow...

I mean, five years ago (ONLY five years ago) people were saying that Series X was going to destroy Sony and they had won the generation already.

How you read the current situation as "dominant" is beyond comprehension. Human comprehension, at least.

 

[Guardian Monkey]

This is a huge story. You should probably contact Connie Chung.

Connie Chung

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

How you read the current situation as "dominant" is beyond comprehension. Human comprehension, at least.

Size & revenue.

Can the human mind comprehend such concepts?

BTW, PlayStation just announced (3 months ago) that they're shifting their KPI from unit sales to MAU. PlayStation is currently at ~123 million MAU. Xbox is currently over 500 million MAU.

 

[yurinka]

Give Parsons credit for selling at the high.

He timed it perfectly selling in early 2022 when interest rates hadnt shot up yet, and he knew Sony would be desperate for a shooter studio since MS bought Activision. Around that time, Sony was also buying up other GAAS studios so he knew Sony had bottomless pockets.

It's been 3.5 years since the buyout and all that Bungie has done is a couple Destiny 2 DLC packs and stolen asset Marathon. Which got delayed to probably sometime in Q1 2026. So by the time it comes out, it'll be 4 years of D2 DLC.

$3.6B for that. And $1.2B was for employee retention fees that arent getting back. What you got left is $2.4B of asset value, which by now is worth pennies on the dollar. Everything has zoomed down the toilet and they dont even have their leader anymore to boot.

The acquisition was $2.4B.

Part of the additional up to $1.2B wasn't paid because some of that people got fired or left before completing the retention period. And if -at least a part- of the bonuses were tied to Bungie performance as usual, due to the delays maybe they didn't get the performance part of the bonuses or just a portion of it.

Bungie is also about to release Destiny Rising (>10M users preregistered) with Netease, incubated the Team TLG project, is working in movie/tv show adaptations of their IPs and moved people to other SIE/PS Studios teams to help the other SIE GaaS titles.

SIE GaaS titles MLB, GT7, Helldivers 2 and Destiny 2 are a huge success and generate around 40% of the SIE first party revenue, which making a rough estimate extrapolating revenue and units percentages should be around twice as big as it was before starting this GaaS push.

Despite having had an important delay for The Final Shape causing Bungie not reach their target for a year (due to the Marathon delay pretty won't achieve either the one they had for this year), Destiny 2 keeps performing great, being every year one of the top grossing games of the year in Steam and Epic Game Store.

Sony pretty likely will recoup the acquisition investment in 5-10 years since the acquisition, which is pretty great compared to the average acquisition case.

BTW, PlayStation just announced (3 months ago) that they're shifting their KPI from unit sales to MAU. PlayStation is currently at ~123 million MAU. Xbox is currently over 500 million MAU.

Sony already had as KPI both units and MAU, and will continue having both. What they said is that they'll focus more on MAU as the main one and less in sales. Something that makes sense because MAU is the main KPI for digital services and digital platforms, and the big majority of PlayStation's software revenue comes from digital services (GaaS and game subs), and also mostly from digital software instead of physical one.

The ~123M MAU is from PlayStation Network, meaing mostly PS consoles only + a tiny portion coming from PC players who doesn't have an active PS console and linked a PSN account in the Sony PC games that support it.

The 500M MAU isn't Xbox consoles only. It's Xbox consoles + MS games in mobile games + MS games in rival consoles + MS games in PC. Of which Xbox consoles must be a tiny portion since Xbox Series must have sold under 30M units until now.

Dominant isn't MS in gaming, the top grossing company in gaming is Sony. Dominant in consoles isn't MS, the one who is the market leader and has the majority of the market share (and growing every year) is PlayStation, who also is dominant regarding console hardware revenue, console software / contents & services revenue, console accesories revenue, game subs revenue or console active userbase.

 

[Guardian Monkey]

I think Destiny Rising is mostly a Netease game.

"Bungie was heavily involved with the project early on, which was code named "Viper."<a href="https://bungie.fandom.com/wiki/Destiny_Rising#cite_note-:0-10"><span>[</span>10<span>]</span></a> They tried to re-negotiate their contract with NetEase to co-develop the game, but negotiations eventually stalled, so Bungie pulled back and only assisted with narrative and support of visual assets. At the time of Rising's reveal, only around five Bungie staff were working on Rising."

https://bungie.fandom.com/wiki/Dest...pcoming,Games in collaboration with Bungie./a>

 

[yurinka]

I think Destiny Rising is mostly a Netease game.

"Bungie was heavily involved with the project early on, which was code named "Viper."<a href="https://bungie.fandom.com/wiki/Destiny_Rising#cite_note-:0-10"><span>[</span>10<span>]</span></a> They tried to re-negotiate their contract with NetEase to co-develop the game, but negotiations eventually stalled, so Bungie pulled back and only assisted with narrative and support of visual assets. At the time of Rising's reveal, only around five Bungie staff were working on Rising."

https://bungie.fandom.com/wiki/Destiny_Rising#:~:text=Destiny: Rising is an upcoming,Games in collaboration with Bungie./a>

SIE owns Bungie and Destiny, so it's a Sony game. Even if it's mostly developed -plus pretty likely published- by Netease (plus as usual pretty likely several outsourcing studios).

What's stupid is not understanding the gaming market in 2025 looks vastly different than the gaming market of 2010. Players have significantly different preferences today.

Yes, unlike in 2010 now the big majority of game revenue in the whole gaming market, in the consoles market and in PlayStation specifically comes from GaaS, who also have the big majority of the playtime hours.

Back then the majority of the revenue came from games released that year, and now the majority comes from games released previous years mostly via addons and game subs plus discounted full game sales, of which most top sellers are GaaS.

In the whole gaming market the main difference is that the mobile gaming market skyrocketed in terms of revenue and userbase, highly growing the gaming market adding a ton of new players.

 

[Bernardougf]

It's harder for me to say that about Kathleen Kennedy because I don't know what her job performance is based on. I know Star Wars (and Indiana Jones) haven't been doing well lately but what percentage of her job is based on that?

I pay more attention to Xbox financials and it does seem like Xbox (or MS Gaming) is in a far more dominant position today than they were 10 years ago. I know the people who still believe in the console wars may bristle at the thought.

She is the CEO and head of lucasfilm.. she has her hands on films and series, she chooses director's, stories and has direct imput on basically any hire... she is as hands-on as it gets for a superior job..

Theres absolute no escaping blame when projects fails because very little is not micromaneged directly or indirectly by her and her minions.

But for some reason other than, succes/sales, she remains in charge..

It is one of the hardest phenomenon to explain in modertn film business or any business at all.

And I put Phil in the same boat.. if not for Disney and its billions she would be gone probably along with the studio a long time ago... and if not for MS backing who knows what might have happened to Phil and xbox.

 

[AJUMP23]

Did he make a lot of money when they sold? Sony has really got to regret the purchase.

 

[yurinka]

Did he make a lot of money when they sold? Sony has really got to regret the purchase.

Before the acquisition the stockholders where Bungie employees, and very likely their CEO was the one who had more stocks. The retention bonuses were applied to stockholder (key) workers, obviously including the CEO.

So yes, make sure he made a lot of money selling Bungie and staying there the time he agreed with Sony for the retention bonus during the transition.

Sony doesn't have anything to regret, he did what they signed in the acquisition. Regarding Bungie's performance, they delayed The Final Shape and Marathon, something that is very common in gaming, and not particularly bad. But Bungie is making a lot of money itself and did help the other SIE GaaS, who did help double their first party revenue making now around 40% of it.

Plus soonish they'll release Destiny Rising, Maraton and Team LFG's game, in addition to continue working in Destiny and off-gaming adaptations of Bungie IPs. With Bungie they may be a bit behind schedule, but in the long term/big picture things go pretty much as planned.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

The acquisition was $2.4B.

Part of the additional up to $1.2B wasn't paid because some of that people got fired or left before completing the retention period. And if -at least a part- of the bonuses were tied to Bungie performance as usual, due to the delays maybe they didn't get the performance part of the bonuses or just a portion of it.

Bungie is also about to release Destiny Rising (>10M users preregistered) with Netease, incubated the Team TLG project, is working in movie/tv show adaptations of their IPs and moved people to other SIE/PS Studios teams to help the other SIE GaaS titles.

SIE GaaS titles MLB, GT7, Helldivers 2 and Destiny 2 are a huge success and generate around 40% of the SIE first party revenue, which making a rough estimate extrapolating revenue and units percentages should be around twice as big as it was before starting this GaaS push.

Despite having had an important delay for The Final Shape causing Bungie not reach their target for a year (due to the Marathon delay pretty won't achieve either the one they had for this year), Destiny 2 keeps performing great, being every year one of the top grossing games of the year in Steam and Epic Game Store.

Sony pretty likely will recoup the acquisition investment in 5-10 years since the acquisition, which is pretty great compared to the average acquisition case.


Sony already had as KPI both units and MAU, and will continue having both. What they said is that they'll focus more on MAU as the main one and less in sales. Something that makes sense because MAU is the main KPI for digital services and digital platforms, and the big majority of PlayStation's software revenue comes from digital services (GaaS and game subs), and also mostly from digital software instead of physical one.

The ~123M MAU is from PlayStation Network, meaing mostly PS consoles only + a tiny portion coming from PC players who doesn't have an active PS console and linked a PSN account in the Sony PC games that support it.

The 500M MAU isn't Xbox consoles only. It's Xbox consoles + MS games in mobile games + MS games in rival consoles + MS games in PC. Of which Xbox consoles must be a tiny portion since Xbox Series must have sold under 30M units until now.

Dominant isn't MS in gaming, the top grossing company in gaming is Sony. Dominant in consoles isn't MS, the one who is the market leader and has the majority of the market share (and growing every year) is PlayStation, who also is dominant regarding console hardware revenue, console software / contents & services revenue, console accesories revenue, game subs revenue or console active userbase.

Sure buddy you just keep pushing that narrative. Funny how the only new GAAS game you always bring up is H2. Dont forget all the other new GAAS initiatives they've done the past 5 years..... various cancelled games like factions 2 and whatever GAAS Bend was working on (and any other studios I missed), Firewalk/Concord, Neon Koi, Fairgames isnt looking great, Marathon delayed/plagiarism. That Deviation studios game they were working with Jason Blundell. All GAAS stuff that's already dead or soon to be.

You got exactly one new GAAS hit. Helldivers 2. Even Destiny 2 has tanked compared to years ago.

The buyout was $3.6B and you have zero idea how much of the retention wasnt paid out. Nor do you have any info how the buyout will be recouped in 5-10 years, since you got no info how much annual profits Bungie makes to counter the $3.6B.

D2 has not been performing great. A while back they even said they missed forecasts by 45% (which lead to layoffs later) and as per articles the company was in the red. Bungie is doing lousy. So no matter how much you push top line sales, it's spent all back on costs and more. And their latest DLC did worse than other packs.

Sony’s Bungie Faces Reckoning After Mass Layoff

The creator of Halo and Destiny laid off more than 200 people this week including several top executives

www.bloomberg.com

 

[Guardian Monkey]

SIE owns Bungie and Destiny, so it's a Sony game. Even if it's mostly developed -plus pretty likely published- by Netease (plus as usual pretty likely several outsourcing studios).

DESTINY: RISING is developed and published by NetEase Games.

The game, and its characters, items, events are under license of Bungie, Inc.

Destiny: Rising - Epic Sci-fi RPG Shooter

Pre-register on App Store and Google Play NOW！

www.playdestinyrising.com

 

[StreetsofBeige]

DESTINY: RISING is developed and published by NetEase Games.

The game, and its characters, items, events are under license of Bungie, Inc.

Destiny: Rising - Epic Sci-fi RPG Shooter

Pre-register on App Store and Google Play NOW！

www.playdestinyrising.com

In other words, Bungie is making pennies on the dollar on the game. NetEase is going to get the lion's share.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

She is the CEO and head of lucasfilm.. she has her hands on films and series, she chooses director's, stories and has direct imput on basically any hire... she is as hands-on as it gets for a superior job..

Theres absolute no escaping blame when projects fails because very little is not micromaneged directly or indirectly by her and her minions.

But for some reason other than, succes/sales, she remains in charge..

It is one of the hardest phenomenon to explain in modertn film business or any business at all.

And I put Phil in the same boat.. if not for Disney and its billions she would be gone probably along with the studio a long time ago... and if not for MS backing who knows what might have happened to Phil and xbox.

I know that's part of her responsibilities (a large part) but I don't know how important other aspects of her job are as well. Is it possible, that she's performing well in other areas that her critics are unaware of?

 

[Bernardougf]

I know that's part of her responsibilities (a large part) but I don't know how important other aspects of her job are as well. Is it possible, that she's performing well in other areas that her critics are unaware of?

How can this be a matter of "critics" when by any business measure she is a failure, without considering personal tastes ?
- turning a billion dollar movie franchise in one that loses money and had to eb put on the fridge
- making very expensive series that at best fails to attract and/or retain viewers and at worst (usually this) is mocked by the ridiculous amateurism in direction and storytelling
- constantly hire and fire directors without projects ever seeing the light of day
- constantly mismanagement of current ongoing projects with writers/directors being replaced mid project
- actively hunting off and attacking a fanbase that made the brand a success
- highly diminishing a very successful merchandising business with the above decisions

Just for a thought exercise... Im what area do you suggest she could be excelling from a business standpoint?

Its simply impossible to justify her job security strictly from a business stand point when she is direct involved with everything. To every single detail and choice.

Edit: anyway thats too much offtopic. Ill read your response but will let this matter go for now.

 

[simpatico]

Yeah but what's the alternative then?

Alternative to what? Bungie was shattered and scattered in the wind almost a decade ago. Chalk up the purchase and investigate for inside fraud. The most cursory due diligence, pre purchase investigation would have shown this. They need to investigate why it didn't come up and why the acquisition still went through when this was known.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

How can this be a matter of "critics" when by any business measure she is a failure, without considering personal tastes ?
- turning a billion dollar movie franchise in one that loses money and had to eb put on the fridge
- making very expensive series that at best fails to attract and/or retain viewers and at worst (usually this) is mocked by the ridiculous amateurism in direction and storytelling
- constantly hire and fire directors without projects ever seeing the light of day
- constantly mismanagement of current ongoing projects with writers/directors being replaced mid project
- actively hunting off and attacking a fanbase that made the brand a success
- highly diminishing a very successful merchandising business with the above decisions

Just for a thought exercise... Im what area do you suggest she could be excelling from a business standpoint?

Its simply impossible to justify her job security strictly from a business stand point when she is direct involved with everything. To every single detail and choice.

Edit: anyway thats too much offtopic. Ill read your response but will let this matter go for now.

Before all this SW Kathleen Kennedy this and that, I never knew who she even was. But her track record before her 10 years worth of endless SW movies and TV shows is fantastic. She's been part of so many great movies in terms of critical and $$$ success.

Something weird happened as the second she touched SW, things just started tanking. One, TOO MUCH SW stuff. And two, a lot of junk which a lot of it was panned by people.

How you can screw up SW is a mystery. There's veteran SW fans who could make better stories than KK. Compare her old work to SW. Just a major shift in worse stories and somehow morphed into tons of DEI casting when SW is a guy focused IP, when her old work wasnt like this.

Maybe part of the problem is overload. The amount of SW stuff the past 5 years seems impossible for anyone to keep up with. And add in those 5 years even an Indiana Jones movie and Willow tv series.

 

[Guardian Monkey]

In other words, Bungie is making pennies on the dollar on the game. NetEase is going to get the lion's share.

exactly.

 

[Guardian Monkey]

Before all this SW Kathleen Kennedy this and that, I never knew who she even was. But her track record before her 10 years worth of endless SW movies and TV shows is fantastic. She's been part of so many great movies in terms of critical and $$$ success.

Something weird happened as the second she touched SW, things just started tanking. One, TOO MUCH SW stuff. And two, a lot of junk which a lot of it was panned by people.

How you can screw up SW is a mystery. There's veteran SW fans who could make better stories than KK. Compare her old work to SW. Just a major shift in worse stories and somehow morphed into tons of DEI casting when SW is a guy focused IP, when her old work wasnt like this.

Maybe part of the problem is overload. The amount of SW stuff the past 5 years seems impossible for anyone to keep up with. And add in those 5 years even an Indiana Jones movie and Willow tv series.

That was ALL Disney looking for bigger market share, not just SW.

 

[Bernardougf]

Before all this SW Kathleen Kennedy this and that, I never knew who she even was. But her track record before her 10 years worth of endless SW movies and TV shows is fantastic. She's been part of so many great movies in terms of critical and $$$ success.

Something weird happened as the second she touched SW, things just started tanking. One, TOO MUCH SW stuff. And two, a lot of junk which a lot of it was panned by people.

How you can screw up SW is a mystery. There's veteran SW fans who could make better stories than KK. Compare her old work to SW. Just a major shift in worse stories and somehow morphed into tons of DEI casting when SW is a guy focused IP, when her old work wasnt like this.

Maybe part of the problem is overload. The amount of SW stuff the past 5 years seems impossible for anyone to keep up with. And add in those 5 years even an Indiana Jones movie and Willow tv series.

She got her name attached to projects she had ZERO actual imput while working with Spielberg and lucas as a glorified secretary.... "executive producer" is and always will be the most useless Hollywood title.

Once in reign she instead of following and improving Lucas work... tried to rapidly kill it and make "her own" with a very strong feminist/woke view of things...

Quantity is a problem when the quality is garbage.... we never talked about marvel fatigue when we were rocking iron man , captain america and thor awsome movies every 6 months for 10 years... but as soon as the shit movies of the M-She-U phase of captain marvel accolades were bombing hard the "fatigue" was the culprit.

 

[P:axMagellanic]

Do you know who the board of directors at Microsoft consists of? Why are you, and the "Xbots on Twitter" so much smarter than the board?

How did these absolute morons get into the position to be paid by Microsoft when you and the "Xbots on Twitter" are assessing performance so much more effectively than they are? I mean, you're not even getting paid for this and your work is way better than theirs.

This is a huge story. You should probably contact Connie Chung.

The fuck are you even talking about anymore?

Millions of people get hired into positions beyond their capabilities every year. It's often not even a reflection on them, as they were likely very competent in their old role.

These companies are byzantine and immense and are often running on sheer fucking momentum long after their founders have left or died.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

The fuck are you even talking about anymore?

Millions of people get hired into positions beyond their capabilities every year. It's often not even a reflection on them, as they were likely very competent in their old role.

These companies are byzantine and immense and are often running on sheer fucking momentum long after their founders have left or died.

If this were true to any significant degree, then the CE0 position wouldn't be compensated so heavily. If companies operated on momentum, they'd pay the CEO the same as the janitor. As a general rule, companies prefer paying employees as low as possible.