Xbox Leadership Changes and Industry Impact

Yeah, things are bad.

And then at Dice of this year, I was actually I was talking to someone

in management at an Xbox studio who was like, this is paraphrase,

but who was like, man,

there's so much uncertainty, we don't really know, like how to do proper planning,

as we're planning ahead for the next year,

the next two years, the next three years. But like, I really trust Phil Spencer.

I think he's a good leader. I think he has our backs.

Roughly one week after that conversation, Phil Spencer was replaced by Asha Sharma,

the new CEO, who is currently running Xbox.

And here we are, during a lot of this,

this kind of this acquisition spending spree when

some of these projects started getting greenlit and started to enter development.

The messaging was not you must hit x amount of profitability.

The messaging was make good games,

help us fill out Game Pass, try to win awards.

Of course, don't lose money break even.

But like this is this is not a profit play.

This is kind of Game Pass is the North Star. Anyway, so

a lot of these studios, they trust me, they made plenty of their own mistakes.

But like, in a lot of ways, they're being punished today for following orders

for listening to what they were told a few years ago.

And that I think is just a shame.

And what's happening is, is going to be pretty brutal.

The word bloodbath has been

thrown around among people that I talked to who know what's happening.

It's going to be bad. So stay tuned.

I'll be reporting more as I learn more on Bloomberg about who's being

affected, how big the scope

is. But those three studios that I mentioned are just the beginning,

there's going to be more,

there are a lot of negotiations going on right now.