So, who exactly is she? Well, externally, she’s the former VP of Product and Engineering at Meta, CEO of Instacart, and current board member for Coupang and Home Depot. She only recently came to Microsoft in 2024 as the President of CoreAI. Don’t worry, if you’re double-checking to see if any of that is related to gaming in some sort of way, let me save you the trouble; it’s not.
Anyone who thinks Xbox is still going to be worth anything is a fool. They overspent on gaming studios, didn’t produce anything of value, gamepass value went down, and now everyone hates them for the constant enshittification. Even stepping back from “This is lemmy and we all hate microsoft” they have done some horrible business moves with Xbox. I don’t know anyone who is positive about the brand. They have ran it firmly into the ground.
But as always they will blame “market conditions” and “customers changing tastes”. Instead of “we pointed a fuckload of MBAs that only care about monetizing in the short term and milking every penny we can short term even though it’s killing all long term prospects of the product and driving away customers in droves”
If I ever end up in a position where I’m reviewing potential employees, having an MBA is going to be an automatic rejection, regardless of their other qualifications.
Imo, getting an MBA makes you worse at being a productive employee. And the people that get them don’t have personalities that are conducive to being good at their jobs
Screw all the consoles. They deserve extinction for scamming everyone for years by requiring monthly subscriptions to play online.
Literally like selling someone a subscription to drive your car out of town.
We do have that. It’s the gas tax we pay to the government.
I dont think the analogy works. Gas taxes are universal in the U.S. for road fuel, they also fund infrastructure, not stock holders and CEOs.
A tax is not an arbitrary subscription fee, it’s an ongoing expensive.
In order for your analogy to work, the fee would need to be created out of no where for no reason other than self enrichment; and there would need to be a viable alternative that provides practically the exact same benefit with no fee. The fee would also need to expire and require renwal despite not using the product, which isn’t the case for gas.
It works pretty well. The console network fees fund infrastructure, the employees that run the infrastructure, etc. neither the gas tax nor the console network fees are arbitrary. As for the “required renewal despite not using it” thing we just have other things for that in the form of vehicle registration.
I mean where they spend the money is irrelevant. If I rob you, is it suddenly okay if I spend your money responsibly? No.
PC has had online multiplayer since the creation of the internet, and PC did it without ever having a fee on top of internet access.
I would also argue that playstation plus membership fees, with all their millions of dollars, have not created a better environment than what available on PC for free, so…
So it’s ok to pay money for infrastructure for your car to use, but when you have to pay for the infrastructure for your video games it’s robbery? Now I feel like you’re the one being arbitrary.
This tells me you weren’t around for the early days of PC gaming. On the contrary, PC gaming went through a couple phases when it came to online multiplayer. Early multiplayer games often didn’t have matchmaking or dedicated server discovery at all, then there was the Gamespy era where a bunch of games delegated their multiplayer matchmaking to a third party with limited functionality and ads unless you paid a premium subscription.
It was the game consoles that really fixed multiplayer early on with their party systems that persisted outside of each game. Today Steam has similar functionality, but Valve is just eating those costs, just as Sony used to. Difference is Valve doesn’t have to sell you your computer at a loss, they they can have loss leaders like that in different areas.
We already discussed this. The Playstation Plus subscription isnt paying for internet infrastructure. PC has no monthly fee, and it’s infrastructure is exactly the same.
Oh I was… So Xbox game pass released in 2002, PlayStation followed much later in 2010.
In 2002 Warcraft 3’s multiplayer was fine. In 2002 Battlefield 1942 was fine; It was a good as Halo’s multiplayer, which somehow ALSO had fine multiplayer at release in 2001 despite the subscription service for multiplayer not until a year after the game had already launched.
Even if I gave you that, the subscription “fee” isn’t what fixed multiplayer design, that was fixed by… Game developers.
It is. The party system, voice chat services, and the ability to join on or invite friends in a universal way regardless of the game without having to make an account for that game all requires expensive infrastructure and manpower to build and maintain.
Xbox GamePass released in 2017 and has nothing to do with multiplayer. The multiplayer service Xbox live released in 2002 and PlayStation followed in 2006. You’re not beating the allegations.
Game developers were uninvolved in the fix for multiplayer design. Game developers are unsurprisingly, only involved in the development of their game. The reliable third party social systems were designed by engineers at Xbox and Sony, and on the PC side at Valve. Multiplayer existed on consoles prior to Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, but just like their PC counterpart, it was clunky, unintuitive, and inconsistent between games. The PlayStation network and XBL were created as a direct result of those issues.