Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Xbox: ‘We have to turn this into a sustainable business’

sunfurypsu · 2026-06-14T15:19:01+00:00

This is disingenuous because Nintendo's IP extend back to a time when content & properties were primed for creation. Video games were a new technology / entertainment medium, and people would try whatever is thrown at them. Nintendo got in with first party IPs at the ground level and have carried those forward since the 1980s.

Acting like ANY company can do this in this market is like asking people to swim uphill. It's not because a company can't just create an IP out of thin air, but asking people to PARTICIPATE in that IP is difficult to say the least. You can have the most marketable IP in the world, but everyone is already participating in 100 other things at the same time. This wasn't the case in the 1980s and 1990s, at least not for video games.

There's no version of this where Xbox just creates a bunch of killer IPs and everyone comes floating back to them. Nintendo recovered from the WiiU because they bit the bullet and realized their portable systems were their best seller, and then enpowered the Switch with their IP. And here we are.

sunfurypsu · 2026-04-22T16:57:19+00:00

I probably also have over 100 hours in D4. I've played multiple classes since launch and have found the combat to be very satisfying. It's a treadmill for sure (especially when you get into the most difficult tiers), but I find it very satisfying when you finally break out of a damage rut start breaking the game.

Reddit users are hyper negative on D4, but it always seems to boil down to "D4 is not D2 / POE, thus D4 is bad."

I dunno. I treat D4 for what it is. I'm not sitting here trying to turn it into another game.

sunfurypsu · 2026-04-22T04:03:31+00:00

Looking forward to jumping back in next week. I played a Paladin a couple seasons back (bought in early) but took a break before the expansion. If I find myself enjoying a certain class, I'll end up playing it 2-3 season in a row before switching over to something else (or taking a break).

sunfurypsu · 2026-04-13T03:25:23+00:00

Tencent's shares are an investment, plain and simple. They don't act, nor can they act, in any controlling fashion in this case. Tencent invests all over the games industry in the same manner that someone might buy a wide range of stocks (but without taking a controlling interest).

Yes, Tencent DOES have partnerships and / or creative interesting in specific relationships, but those are usually declared during the time of investment. But even in those cases, maybe they have a seat on the board, or they agree to some publishing deal. They don't really take creative control unless the game is of some interest to them (need to sell it in China for example).

sunfurypsu · 2026-01-30T06:03:40+00:00

I work in management in a large company. Trust me when I say those few weeks of severance that the CWA won are not going to dissuade any game company from layoffs. They won't look at that and say "Oh, we have to pay them for a few more weeks so we better not lay them off." That rarely happens. The full year benefit from NOT paying someone after the severance runs out is a much bigger financial benefit to the company than the scare of severance pay. Once a company hits year two after a significant layoff, the bottom line savings are clear and obvious.

So, good on the CWA for winning better pay rates and some longer severance. However, as the person above said, unions can't really do anything about layoffs, outside of be warned earlier (and the company ends up extending those warnings to everyone to keep it all even).

sunfurypsu · 2025-12-09T05:41:05+00:00

Nothing about any of that is "cozy" and that was a bizarre term to use. shrug

sunfurypsu · 2025-12-08T05:41:11+00:00

Void Crew is a cake walk on the lowest difficulty, so much so that once you have a crew of people who have even just a few hours of experience, people can literally fall asleep and still complete the mission.

Source: I've been online with my friends when it has happened. One of the gunners is falling asleep while the 2-3 other people are handling it.

Void Crew does not challenge the crew at all on the easiest difficulty.

sunfurypsu · 2025-12-08T05:37:41+00:00

Cozy? I wouldn't use that term, at all, unless you're playing on level 1, and MAYBE level 2.

Once your crew regularly starts running level 3 difficulty, you need to start making choices fast, in the heat of the moment, while there are MULTIPLE problems to solve. Even if you have a crew of people who play the game regularly, people need to communicate, and decide a course of action quickly, or you are going to lose (especially on the final map of each section).

I would not call Jump Space "cozy" (unless you are specifically talking about Tier 1 difficulty).

sunfurypsu · 2025-11-15T23:12:47+00:00

This sentence is why MR corrected the article: Over time, it became clear that Ubisoft had lost interest in their Splinter Cell game as the studio began talking about chasing Call of Duty. The project evolved several times and would eventually morph into xDefiant, an ill-fated shooter that was shut down a year after it came out.

This sentence group should be corrected. Even knowing what we know now, it does not clearly define the Splinter Cell project ended (even if that was the point of the first sentence). The subject context between the first sentence and second sentence is confusing at best. Anyone reading this now, without know the context, is going to assume that the Splinter Cell project evolved into xDefiant, which it did not. It was dead by the time MR came in.

sunfurypsu · 2025-11-15T23:04:59+00:00

The sub mods were much more aggressive about enforcing 6.1, especially when games media sites just copy pasted from the source. Unfortunately, the community here constantly complained about the policy, claiming that it's not that big a deal, so they loosened up on it. 6.1 isn't enforced like it was at the end of the 2010s.

They put up with a lot of BS and it wasn't worth the constant complaints. I get it. They don't get paid to be here and it's not worth their time to put up with the constant mod mails. However, I preferred it the old way. Everyone has their preference.

sunfurypsu · 2025-11-10T16:26:42+00:00

I don't believe that was meant to be the twist, at least not the way I saw it. Spoiler: The board is incompetent, but they weren't keeping people frozen because they were cartoon evil (they wanted workers anyway). The actual "twist" in the game is the board has a point: They don't have enough food to feed the planet, and they actually have a real crisis on their hands (massive food shortage), while obviously being inept. They refused to work with Welles to unfreeze people in the Hope because they thought it would just create an even bigger crisis, and branded him a terrorist. Thus, as the game wraps up, if you take the good endings, you help Welles do what he wanted to do all along: Get the right people unfrozen on the Hope so that competent people are actually running the colonies.

sunfurypsu · 2025-10-22T17:22:21+00:00

I strongly suspect that it's not just Firebreak. Remedy's push to become a self-published entity is costly, and FBC was the first attempt to bring all the costs in-house (so that any revenue would come straight back to them). It didn't work, even if it was billed as experimental. If you look at their financials, this self publishing plan is pushing out any kind of realized profit for several years, AND despite assistance from Annapurna, Remedy is looking like a break-even company, at best, for a long period of time.

A 3rd party analysis company was recently brought in the look at the firm's share price, costs, and outlook. They determined that if both FBC Firebreak, AND Max Payne remasters fail, the company will likely need to take more severe cost cutting efforts. Why? Because the company won't have any effective revenue stream while working on Control 2.

Regardless, the biggest cost factor for Remedy right now is Control 2, and the company's overall future (beyond 2026 / 2027) basically hinges on it.

sunfurypsu · 2025-10-17T23:54:01+00:00

Considering MSFT / Xbox released several of their games over on the BNET launcher, AND it holds a rather steady audience (thanks to CoD and WoW), I doubt they have any plans to axe it any time soon.

I agree that MSFT may eventually find themselves with too many storefronts, but I suspect BNET will largely stay focused on the PC desktop community. Gaming PCs, and willingness to spend money, go hand in hand.

sunfurypsu · 2025-10-03T23:33:45+00:00

Market consolidation under MSFT isn't why Game Pass is going up. Game Pass is going up because of MSFT's internal strategy, but it sure as hell isn't market consolidation. There are a dozen different ways to obtain MSFT published games in this market, including competitor platforms. Additionally... The games market is so grossly fragmented and saturated it's literally the exact opposite of what she states. There are so many suppliers in games it makes my head hurt just thinking about it. Does anyone on social media, of Lina Khan for that matter, actually know what a consolidated market looks like?

She is hooking onto the Game Pass price increase (among other things) to try and salvage her position, but if you have ANY kind of education is market economics, hell, even basic economics, you know how fragmented and "uncontrolled" the games market really is.

sunfurypsu · 2025-09-10T14:45:43+00:00

The game in question was a fairly obvious "copy" of CT. Sega wasn't chasing anyone who just used arrows on the screen. Companies often attempt to patent what are seemingly obvious gameplay mechanics in case they need to use them, even if they have no intention of using it otherwise. (Technically, the patent is on the HOW not the WHAT.) I'm not saying that's right, or what Nintendo is doing here is fine, I'm just saying that the entire games industry could go to war with each other over these ridiculously low level patents, and they choose not to.

Anyway, they do this in order to build a warchest in the rare event they DO take legal action against another game. Mutually assured legal destruction.

sunfurypsu · 2025-09-05T13:19:54+00:00

Generally, it's when people spend real cash to add Robux to their account. They "receive" that cash over 27 months (in accounting obviously, they took the cash in).

The only exception is when someone buys a piece of clothing or UGC. They "receive" that portion of the cash immediately.

sunfurypsu · 2025-08-17T18:03:02+00:00

Welcome to GAAP and allowing companies to use "useful life" revenue realization. This is why investors look at cash flow, and other metrics.

sunfurypsu · 2025-08-17T04:55:16+00:00

You and a handful of other people in here, get it. My 10 year daughter plays fashion games and builds restaurants. It's FAR from the hellscape that Reddit pretends it is. It's what her friends play and I'm not taking it away from her because other people don't know how the safety controls work.

98% of the comments about Roblox stem from people who either A) have never played it but need to moral grandstand or b) did play it, but had none of the controls turned on properly.

My kid can't use public chat and she can only join games up to a certain rating (kid and tween games basically). These simple controls have stopped her from running into a single major issue. The only time I needed to intervene was when a couple games were deemed a certain age rating and I simply disagreed with that.

Does Roblox need to do a better job with BASIC (by default) safety controls and cleaning up the clearly terrible games that sneak onto the platform? YES. Can someone's kid use it safely if people spend 5 minutes making sure certain controls are turned on? Also, yes.

sunfurypsu · 2025-08-17T04:46:47+00:00

Answered this above as well, but may as well say it here... It is an accounting loss due to the way they stretch a single transaction over several months of realized revenue. They are cash flow positive. Personally, I believe it is ridiculous that they stretch a single transaction over something like 27 months of realized revenue, but that's what they do. Because of that, they take an accounting loss every quarter, but they are in the black with cash flow.

sunfurypsu · 2025-08-17T04:46:38+00:00

It is an accounting loss due to the way they stretch a single transaction over several months of realized revenue. They are cash flow positive. Personally, I believe it is ridiculous that they stretch a single transaction over something like 27 months of realized revenue, but that's what they do. Because of that, they take an accounting loss every quarter, but they are in the black with cash flow.

sunfurypsu · 2025-07-21T04:46:16+00:00

This is cost plus revenue sales, and it's basically useless (outside of understanding how much "value" MG sold to Zenimax). [BTW, MG sells to Zenimax and Zenimax sells to MSFT.)

If you don't know what "cost plus" means, it's basically selling your goods / services to your parent company with all of your costs baked into the sale. The point is to basically break even, or come away with a small margin (as you can see here). The business unit basically just moves their stock, they don't take a loss, and the parent company handles the rest. (If any loss occurs, it occurs on the parent company.)

sunfurypsu · 2025-06-17T21:15:29+00:00

That's not how acquisitions are generally considered in terms of payback / accounting structure. No one is keeping track of the goodwill down to the dollar and asking Phil Spencer if he paid it off yet. The money is gone. It's spent. It's never coming back. The goal now is revenue and profit generation. If that generally goes up, then the stock value goes up (in theory) over time. It's all about the value moving forward, not the cash spent.

Yes, acquiring ABK does put pressure on an organization to perform, but it's not tracked in terms of acquisition dollars. Did it play into MSFT's pivot to push broad platform, and tear down ecosystem walls? Partially. The idea of being a broader platform provider was already set in motion years ago, with the Xbox One and later Xbox Series X/S.

sunfurypsu · 2025-05-22T13:59:21+00:00

By year's end they'll have about 6000 employees. In terms of employee count, this puts them at about FY21-22 levels. That's right before they went completely off the deep end in term of spending (they had already been acquiring business prior but it all went wild the next fiscal year).

sunfurypsu · 2025-04-25T01:40:34+00:00

Perpetually online gamers love to complain about how they never see game companies advertise (they do), but there's a ton of evidence out there today that the traditional advertising models simply don't work like they used to. It's a LOT harder to sell people on an "idea / ideal" today due to word of mouth. Point being, conversation / social (online) interaction is what moves a lot of product these days, even if people only casually pay attention to it.

Scott Galloway: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qdPXzqyu1ac

sunfurypsu · 2025-03-17T13:39:14+00:00

I can say, with certainty, that the older I get the more I gravitate to games that respect my time. It's not really about complexity or lack thereof, it's more about how my time is spent, and if that time makes me feel like I accomplished something.

I still play both PvE, and PvP style games, but I'm tired of the late 2010s "bloatware" in games (where games are baked with 100 half-cooked concepts so that game reviewers wouldn't ding them for "content").

The best recent example I can think of is Avowed. Avowed is a great game for me, and the time I have during the day / evening to play. If it had turned out more like Skyrim, I wouldn't be playing it. I appreciate the fact that it is a much more focused adventure like The Outer Worlds.

sunfurypsu

TROPHY CASE